You’ve probably heard that NASA is to crash two unmanned rockets into the Moon in a bid to uncover the presence of water.

At 12.31 BST today, the first rocket will impact our satellite in the Cabeus crater near its south pole in order to “kick up the dust” of the lunar surface. The 2,200kg Centaur rocket will be travelling at around 5590 mph when it hits, and NASA estimates that the collision will throw roughly 770 million pounds of debris in a 3.7 mile-high plume and create a crater about 12 feet deep and 80 feet wide.

A second rocket will follow four minutes later, and onboard spectrometers will scan the debris cloud for signs of water, hydroxyl compounds, salts, clays, hydrated minerals and organic molecules.

The £49m mission is called LCROSS – the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite. It was launched in June and has since been orbiting the Earth in order to use the planet’s gravity to slingshot it towards the lunar surface. The project’s principal investigator Anthony Colaprete said: “We’re going to lift matter up from the crater that could have been in shadow for 2 billion years. For the first time, we’ll see what it is composed of, what secrets it is guarding.”

The crashes will also be watched by Hubble, European and Indian satellites, and Earth-based observatories. If the hoped-for evidence of water-ice does appear, it will mark a major step towards possible colonisation of our cosmic neighbour.