Moon, Bitches!

The improbable story that Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize obscured the actually far stranger story that we, um, bombed the moon last night.

NASA crashed a piece of space junk into the moon's south pole this morning to find out if the dark, cold craters there contain water in the form of ice.

The impact of the 2.2-ton empty rocket part kicked up a cloud of dust. Then, a second spacecraft flew down through that dust, checking for water, and sent data and live footage of the crash back to Earth.

NASA broadcast the images on its Web site, but it wasn't as dramatic as some had hoped — just a scene full of gray craters, and the craters slowly got bigger and bigger as the spacecraft seemed to creep toward the moon frame by frame.

I started reading about this on Twitter last night and I thought it was a joke meme. But no, we actually went ahead and bombed the moon.

For science!