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"Everything really worked very well, the spacecraft flew perfect, the instruments performed better than expected in some cases. We got interesting results," read a NASA statement.
Cameras mounted on the 1,965-pound (891-kilogram) shepherding spacecraft failed to beam live footage of the initial impact as the craft flew behind the impacter, though NASA insisted the experiment went well.
During the experiment, grainy thermal images carried on the US space agency's television station showed colder blue sites and warmer red sites on the moon's surface.
There was no picture of a huge plume of dust that scientists had expected to see after the impact.
The crash may not have tossed up as much material as expected, or perhaps it hit the slopes of the deep crater, said Anthony Colaprete, project scientist and principal investigator for the 79-million-dollar LCROSS mission.
"We don't anticipate anything about presence or absence of water immediately. It's going to take us some time," said Colaprete.
Colaprete downplayed the importance of having no pictures of the plume, because he said light spectrum measurements will show if there is water in the lunar soil that was tossed up. The instruments that took those measurements worked perfectly, he said.
Colaprete said it would take days for analysts to evaluate the data and several weeks to determine whether and how much hydrogen-bearing compounds were found.
"This is a great day for science and exploration," said Doug Cooke, NASA associate administrator for the Exploration Systems Mission.
The mission data "should prove to be an impressive addition to the tremendous leaps in knowledge about the moon that have been achieved in recent weeks," he said.
The LCROSS mission was launched in June aboard the Atlas V orbiter with the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, a probe tasked with producing a detailed map of the moon.
Scientists hope the desolate lunar pole will be a fertile hunting ground in their search for water.
"We're hunting for how water ice was stored and trapped in these permanently shadowed areas over billions of years and we want to find out how much there is," explained Peter Schultz, a professor of geological sciences at Brown University, who helped design the mission.
The mission comes just two weeks after India hailed the discovery of water on the moon with its Chandrayaan-1 satellite mission, in partnership with NASA.
Scientists had previously theorized that, except for the possibility of ice at the bottom of craters, the moon was totally dry.
Finding water on Earth's natural satellite would be a major breakthrough in space exploration.
"This could be the place that we could go to mine water for a permanent lunar base," said Schultz.
"It tells us something about how water was delivered to the moon and other planets in a sort of cosmic rain, meaning impacts from comets over eons."
"If we had it there, we could actually make exploration be a bit more sustainable," NASA's Friedensen said. "We could make fuel on the moon."
NASA's future missions to the moon however remain uncertain, as a key review panel appointed by President Barack Obama said existing budgets are not large enough to fund a return mission before 2020.
The last manned mission to the moon was Apollo 17 in 1972.
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Cameras mounted on the 1,965-pound (891-kilogram) shepherding spacecraft failed to beam live footage of the initial impact as the craft flew behind the impacter, though NASA insisted the experiment went well.
During the experiment, grainy thermal images carried on the US space agency's television station showed colder blue sites and warmer red sites on the moon's surface.
There was no picture of a huge plume of dust that scientists had expected to see after the impact.
The crash may not have tossed up as much material as expected, or perhaps it hit the slopes of the deep crater, said Anthony Colaprete, project scientist and principal investigator for the 79-million-dollar LCROSS mission.
"We don't anticipate anything about presence or absence of water immediately. It's going to take us some time," said Colaprete.
Colaprete downplayed the importance of having no pictures of the plume, because he said light spectrum measurements will show if there is water in the lunar soil that was tossed up. The instruments that took those measurements worked perfectly, he said.
Colaprete said it would take days for analysts to evaluate the data and several weeks to determine whether and how much hydrogen-bearing compounds were found.
"This is a great day for science and exploration," said Doug Cooke, NASA associate administrator for the Exploration Systems Mission.
The mission data "should prove to be an impressive addition to the tremendous leaps in knowledge about the moon that have been achieved in recent weeks," he said.
The LCROSS mission was launched in June aboard the Atlas V orbiter with the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, a probe tasked with producing a detailed map of the moon.
Scientists hope the desolate lunar pole will be a fertile hunting ground in their search for water.
"We're hunting for how water ice was stored and trapped in these permanently shadowed areas over billions of years and we want to find out how much there is," explained Peter Schultz, a professor of geological sciences at Brown University, who helped design the mission.
The mission comes just two weeks after India hailed the discovery of water on the moon with its Chandrayaan-1 satellite mission, in partnership with NASA.
Scientists had previously theorized that, except for the possibility of ice at the bottom of craters, the moon was totally dry.
Finding water on Earth's natural satellite would be a major breakthrough in space exploration.
"This could be the place that we could go to mine water for a permanent lunar base," said Schultz.
"It tells us something about how water was delivered to the moon and other planets in a sort of cosmic rain, meaning impacts from comets over eons."
"If we had it there, we could actually make exploration be a bit more sustainable," NASA's Friedensen said. "We could make fuel on the moon."
NASA's future missions to the moon however remain uncertain, as a key review panel appointed by President Barack Obama said existing budgets are not large enough to fund a return mission before 2020.
The last manned mission to the moon was Apollo 17 in 1972.
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