A NASA probe has taken over flight control from a rocket stage that helped propel it into space today.The handover from the Atlas V Centaur stage to the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, or LCROSS, marked a successful conclusion to today's launch from Cape Canaveral.
The United Launch Alliance Atlas V blasted off from Launch Complex 41 at 5:32 p.m.
About 45 minutes later the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter separated from the Centaur stage and began a roughly five-day cruise toward lunar orbit. It's expected to arrive there at 5:43 a.m. Tuesday.
That left LCROSS and the Centaur, which will remain hitched for the next four months.
About four hours after launch, the Centaur handed off control of the joined vehicles to the spacecraft and essentially became dead weight.
After looping around Earth, the two spacecraft will line up for crashes into the moon at steep angles in October.
The Centaur, which was developed to boost pre-Apollo Surveyor missions in the late 1960s, will hurtle toward a permanently shadowed crater on the moon's south pole.
Mark you calendar for Oct. 9, when the impact is scheduled to occur in the morning.
NASA says people west of the Mississippi, where it is still dark, will be able to see th resulting plume through 10- to 12-inch telescopes. Hawaii is the primary observation site.
LCROSS will fly through the plume, collecting data that could answer the question of whether the moon's freezing dark craters hold water ice.
Four minutes after the Centaur, LCROSS will crash.
Image: Click to enlarge the artist's rendering of the LCROSS spaceraft and Centaur separation, planned in October. Credit: NASA.
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