NASA officials and scientists spent the better part of an hour in this morning's press conference patting themselves on the back. The LCROSS mission in search of lunar water was a great success, they said, all the while ignoring a very large elephant in the room: No one among the millions watching as a 2-ton hunk of metal slammed into the moon could see the much-ballyhooed spray of dust and debris that they had been told to look for.

Even LCROSS scientists have seen nothing of a debris plume. "I'm not necessarily surprised," said LCROSS principal investigator Anthony Colaprete of NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California. In exploration, "you just never know how these things are going to go. We just have to go back with a finer-tooth comb." Colaprete's dogged optimism is grounded in enticing spectroscopic changes detected ... Read more »