Moon crash comes up dry.

Last July 31, with the Lunar Prospector spacecraft nearly out of fuel, NASA ended the mission with a bang. Directing the craft to plow kamikaze-style into the moon, scientists hoped the controlled collision would reveal the presence of lunar water. An extensive review of observations made after the crash, however, hasn't found evidence of a single drop.

If the crash site, a permanently shadowed crater at the moon's south pole, contains ice, the collision could have sent up plumes of water vapor or hydroxyl molecules. In theory, the plumes could be detected by a slew of telescopes in space and on Earth.

It was immediately obvious that the crash had not made a major splash (SN: 8/7/99, p. 84). Several months of analysis show no sign of water, says Edwin S. Barker of the University of Texas at Austin. His team reported the findings Oct. 13 at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Padua, Italy.

The negative finding does not suggest that the moon has no water, the team emphasizes. Lunar Prospector may have missed its target and crashed into solid rock rather than an icy crater. Alternatively, water vapor created during the collision may not have risen far enough above the crater wall for telescopes to detect it. Some of the dozen or so telescopes that the astronomers used didn't gaze at the moon soon enough after the crash or weren't pointed properly, the researchers note.