See other posts from October 2009
LCROSS Centaur separation and braking burn successful
Posted By Emily Lakdawalla
2009/10/08 10:55 CDT
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LCROSS and its Centaur upper stage have separated successfully, and the LCROSS shepherd spacecraft has braked in order to follow behind the Centaur when both impact the Moon tomorrow. Everything seemed to go perfectly. Here's a four-frame animation (covering about 5 minutes of real time) of the Centaur slowly drifting away from LCROSS. It's always special to see artifacts that we built here on Earth, floating in the utterly alien environment of space.

LCROSS watches the Centaur move ahead
At 7 p.m. Pacific time on October 8 (02:00 UTC October 9), LCROSS watched its Centaur upper stage drift slowly away. The two had just separated after spending more than 100 days orbiting Earth together. The Centaur will impact the Moon four minutes before the LCROSS shepherding spacecraft at 4:31 a.m. Pacific / 11:31 UTC on October 9.See you all in about 7 hours...
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