Scientists said NASA's moon-smashing mission produced enough data on Friday to address questions about lunar water ice — but the crash didn't come close to meeting public expectations as a cosmic fireworks show.

"Today we kicked up some moondust, and all indications are we are going to have some really interesting results," said Pete Worden, director of NASA's Ames Research Center in California. Ames served as the mission control center for the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite mission, or LCROSS.

The aim of the $79 million mission was to send two spacecraft — a spent rocket stage and an instrument-equipped "shepherding spacecraft" — down into a crater near the moon's south pole at about 5,600 mph (9,000 kilometers per hour) and see if the impacts threw up water ice. Recent research has confirmed the view that water ice is prevalent on the lunar surface, and scientists believe permanently shadowed craters are the best places to find such ice.In the long term, ice reservoirs could be used to provide water for lunar settlements, as well as oxygen for breathing and hydrogen fuel for spacecraft. In the shorter term, learning about lunar water could help scientists reconstruct the ancient past of the Earth-moon system.

The LCROSS blast promised to show how much water ice might lie within a cold, dark crater known as Cabeus. And judging by that scientific standard, members of the LCROSS team said Friday's closely observed crash was shaping up as a smashing success. The spacecraft hit the crater in a shadowed area, just as hoped. All of LCROSS' instruments appeared to be working as expected, and observations were streaming in from a network of ground-based telescopes monitoring the impact.

"We got the information we need to address the question," principal investigator Anthony Colaprete told reporters.

What a waste of time, why dident they just send a team up there to drill a hole in it , conspiracy theoryist say man has not been to the moon yet ! possible i think , how long ago did the last man set foot on the moon , does seem very strange that with todays TEC we havent been back !