Fly me to the moon, so I can EXPLODE it!

For those of you who are not aware of NASA's latest space adventure, this blog post could prove to be informative, humorous, depressing, or a combination of them all.
Let's go to the very beginning: June 18th of this year, NASA commenced the LCROSS(Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite) mission. It's primary goal was to measure the concentration of water ice (ice to dust ratio) in permanently shadowed regolith. Sounds exciting right?

Well, yesterday morning the LCROSS completed its 113 day mission by blowing up a (albeit very small) portion of the moon. You may have been wondering how the researchers at NASA were going to figure out if water particles where present on the surface of the moon with a satellite. The satellite is a long distance from the surface, and finding ice particles among all the dust and rock would be very difficult, if not impossible, at long range. So, this is the plan NASA came up with. At about 54,000 miles above the moon's surface, the LCROSS satellite separated from its spent Centaur upper stage rocket. For those of you who don't know what that is, it's a rocket that gives the satellite the last burst of speed it needs to reach escape velocity. After separation, the Centaur rocket proceeded to ram straight into the Cabeus moon crater. The resulting plume of dust and surface material extended about six miles above the moon's face. The LCROSS satellite, which was following the Centaur, flew straight into this plume observing the particles for about four minutes, before it too crashed into the moon's surface.

That's not very nice, now is it? Now the moon has two new twin impact craters. NASA went and messed up the moon's face. Ok, that's not really the case. The moon already has so many craters, what are two more going to change, right? Normally, I am a major supporter of NASA, but did they really need to ram stuff into the moon? Really? It almost seems like a bunch of adult children playing with adult toys. But, hey, every member on the LCROSS mission team will be able to say, "hey, we shot the moon!"