Oct. 9 (Bloomberg) -- NASA crashed a rocket into a crater near the moon’s south pole today as part of an experiment to kick up a cloud of debris that scientists can analyze for evidence of frozen water.

Researchers then flew a probe through the dust plume to observe its contents and transmit the data back to Earth. The probe also slammed into the lunar surface.

Ice on the moon would supply future explorers with drinking water or air for breathing and rocket fuel, once broken down into hydrogen and oxygen, according to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

NASA researchers will sift through the data and compare notes with other observatories to confirm if water was detected, Jonas Dino, a spokesman for NASA, said before the impact. A report on the findings will take months to prepare, he said.

“These craters have floors that have not seen sunlight for perhaps billions of years,” said Dino, who works at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California. “So it would be one of those places where we would have ancient ice that we can possibly sample in the future to see how the solar system was formed.”

The mission was dubbed Lcross, for Lunar CRater Observation and Sensing Satellite. The rocket propelling the satellite detached first and smashed into the moon. NASA said it expected the impact to create a crater about 20 meters (66 feet) wide and 3 meters deep and disturb about 250 metric tons of lunar dust.

Return to Moon

Lcross, part of NASA’s $120 billion plan to return to the moon by 2020 as a step toward a manned mission to Mars, was built by Northrop Grumman Corp. at a cost of $79 million. The probe was launched on June 18 from Cape Canaveral, Florida, aboard an Atlas V rocket and has been guided by scientists at Ames.

“Discovering water on the moon would be like finding a gold mine,” NASA said in a statement last year. It costs about $50,000 a pound to launch something to the moon, meaning that’s about what it would cost to transport a bottle of water there, the statement said.

Researchers said in the journal Science last month that the upper few millimeters of the moon’s surface contain molecules of water, or H2O, and hydroxyl -- an indication that water formation may be an ongoing process at the moon’s surface. The data was gathered by India’s first lunar mission.

The researchers concluded the water likely originates from the impact of charged hydrogen particles, carried by the so- called solar wind, with oxygen in the lunar soil.

NASA’s Lunar Prospector was purposely crashed into the moon’s surface in 1999, and didn’t detect any evidence of water ice in the plume it generated. The year before, the probe had detected hydrogen at the moon’s polar region.

To contact the reporter on this story: Ryan Flinn in San Francisco at rflinn@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: October 9, 2009 07:53 EDT