Did NASA fail at it's Moon mission?

No experiment is a failure.

NASA intended to crash the spent Centaur booster rocket on the moon. They did that.

And while they haven't seen the debris plume from Earth, that doesn't mean the moon is composed of something unknown (scientists never assume that kind of thing from missing information).

The plume may have ejected out on an unexpected angle or not risen high enough to be spotted by spacecraft and observers on Earth.

The crater is the predicted by scientists (about 20 meters wide) - if the moon wasn't solid it would be different than the predicted size.

All the smart-alecks going off about how the value is in the science itself, I bet none of you have ever had to apply for a major grant. Experiments cost money, and if you get a stream of data, your sponsor is gonna expect it to lead to something big. Or there won't be any second experiment.

And considering the sponsor is the taxpayers, get off your scholastic high horses and justify the expense outside the terms of your specialty. If all science is worthwhile in and of itself, pay for it yourself.

The mission, for what it was worth, produced useable data to be studied by science. But the criteria for deciding if it succeeded or failed is whether it justified the price tag. Space exploration is foremost a human enterprise, not just a scientific venture. Collecting data alone doesn't justify spending money.

Besides that, going to the moon itself is a pretty weak idea. It's motivated almost entirely by the whole public sci-fi movie fascination that scientists say they hate, but simultaneously milk for its dollar value to justify spending money on the wrong priorities. During the Apollo missions, the public showed how fickle its moon mania really was when the later missions couldn't even get on live tv. There's no real human need to explore or live on the moon, ice or not, but some NASA people love to exploit people's shallow fascination with the idea. It's a lifeless globe, it's not inhabitable, and it would make a terrible rest stop for interplanetary missions because it's a big fat gravity well. Terrible construction site too. So that leaves scientific reasons, and the scientific questions about the moon are all relatively minor in scope compared to the rest of the solar system. Mostly just questions about the moon itself. If these questions had to compete on a level field with other objectives, nobody would be messing around on the moon at all. They'd be sending unmanned probes to places like Europa and its vast amounts of liquid water, and to other Jovian and Ionian moons with turbulent geology or proto-organic chemicals. What's on the moon? Not life, nor anything else relatively remarkable.

The search for ET life is ultimately the most compelling motive for space exploration from both a human and science perspective. The only places where it's likely to exist are better reached by unmanned missions. Going to the moon is a secondary priority for science, and a waste of time for overall human affairs.

While the moon bombing was unmanned, it was geared toward future manned missions. The money could have been better spent. The question isn't whether the mission was a failure or a success, but was it worthwhile. I'd have rather spent my tax money toward Europa.

If life were found on Europa, you wouldn't see people switching to their favorite sitcom after 3 months, like they did with Apollo.

No NASA did not fail, the craft took photos, and gathered data, once the data is gone over they should know more than they did know about the moon.

The reason I think they didn't the dust rising like they thought it would, was because the angel the craft hot the crater it threw the dust out at a steep angle to where it didn't get up into the sun light to where it could be seen.

A mission that fails is one that does not make it to where it's suppose to go, and does not do the job it was suppose to do, do this test, throw a rock into a pile of sand in front of you, the sand that is kicked up will come in direction the rock was thrown from, then if you stood right over the top of the sand pile and dropped the rock straight down, the sand would go straight up.

It's not a failure. We still learned something, it just might not be what we expected. That's the whole point of an experiment, to see whether or not what you predicted is actually true. Without experiments you could just sit around and make stuff up, and never test it.

Also, they know the Moon is solid, and they know it has a fine dusty topsoil. What they were trying to figure out is whether there was ice mixed in under the surface.

On NASA TV this morning, they said they had not analyzed the data yet. Even though no 6 mile plume was seen, they had received data on the material thrown upward by the impact.

It defiantly was not what they expected, but no one is calling it a failure. It was an experiment and you won't know the outcome until you actually perform the experiment. It is going to take a while to go through the data collected so they cannot conclude anything yet.

They said they got all the data they needed for the experiment. It just wasn't as visible as they thought it would be.