Moon crash-landing didn't produce water vapour

The Lunar Prospector spacecraft crashed on the moon early Saturday morning, in a planned collision to find evidence of water beneath the moon's surface.

NASA engineers following the mission and crash landing haven't found what they're looking for, however. The powerful telescopes on Earth failed to detect any dust cloud..

The 160-kilogram spacecraft smashed into a crater near the lunar south pole at 6,000 kilometers per hour. Scientists were hoping the plume of dust and vapour released by the force of the crash would show evidence of moon water.

Some scientists believe there could be as much as 200 million tonnes of water mixed in with the soil near the moon's poles.

Scientists say the lack of dust does not necessarily prove a lack of water on the moon. Telescopes with ultraviolet filters will continue to monitor the crash site, looking for evidence that water vapor was released by the impact.

An analysis of the ultraviolet pictures could take weeks.

Lunar Prospector was launched Jan. 6, 1998, and spent 18 months circling the moon. It completed more than 6,800 orbits, analyzing the moon's chemistry, gravity and magnetic fields.

Some of that data indicated there may be water at the moon's poles.

The search for water wasn't the only goal of Saturday's crash. The Lunar Prospector was also carrying a U.S. astronomer to his final resting place.

A one-ounce vial of Eugene Shoemaker's cremated remains was on board. The highly respected astronomer had always wanted to be an astronaut but was disqualified from NASA's training program because he had Addison's disease.

"Not going to the moon and banging on it with my own hammer has been the biggest disappointment in life," he once said.

Instead of going up in space, Shoemaker taught geology to Apollo astronauts.

After he died in a car crash in 1997, most of his cremated remains were sprinkled in a massive crater in Arizona that he had discovered was formed by a meteor crash about 50,000 years ago.

But some of his ashes were set aside, so that NASA could eventually send at least part of him to the moon.