This should lay to rest the controversy over existence of a moon atmosphere or not. At that velocity there'll be a spectacular light show if it passes through atmosphere of any kind as the craft vaporises.

I'm tipping no light show and the whole craft impacting unscathed (except for the final millisecond when it hits the surface that is )

I suppose they could crash it on the dark side to prevent us seeing it of course

This reeks of stupidity and wrecklessness, and a dash of "something just isn't right".

I suppose if the U.S. did fake the moon landing then this is Japan's way of saying FIRST! with a nice crater to go along with it.

It is a Nuke, ruunnn !!

This could also be an oppertunity to check the 'bell ring' effect again, and I hope it is on the near side so that we can watch it in our telescopes, or is it gonna be on the far side so that we dont know for sure if they crashed it or sent it out in space for some DarkOps mission.. ??

Lets hope they don't crash it anywhere near NASA's supposed Moon landing sites. Can you imagine the ramifications of that?

Originally posted by ChemBreather
I hope it is on the near side so that we can watch it in our telescopes, or is it gonna be on the far side so that we dont know for sure if they crashed it or sent it out in space for some DarkOps mission.. ??

The above article states...

The impact is expected to occur on the near-side of the moon, in the dark area close to the limb, at lunar coordinates 80°E and 64°S

-E-

Spacecraft have indeed been unpurposely slammed into the moon and planets. Going back to the early 1960's the russians sent many spacecraft called LUNA..they were desigend to intentioanlly slam into the moon, to be the first country to at leat land something their. AS they learned more about the moons gravity and how slow ro fast the spacecraft shuold fly..they probably crashed a good 4 or 5 of them, till they learned how to achieve the mathmatics for lunar orbiting.
The spacecraft Galileo in 2000 was it? ended it mission and was sent hurdling into Jupiter,t ill it melted and fell apart. Thier was a mission to an asteroid late 1990's, that intentioanly shot and crashed a camera attached to a tiny spacecraft to impact the asteroid...
Magellan to Venus, 1990...after its mission , they let the spacecrafts orbit decay utnil the spacecraft burned up in the Venusian atmosphere...
They do that, so they dont leave junk floating around on a foreign sphere. They cant rturn it home as the spacecraft has NO fuel for that kinda journey,even to the moon...plus it wouldnt survive re entry in earth atmosphere..SO! only real option anyone has, is to destry the craft...hwoever it does kinda litter the lunar landscape...

You guys know that both the US and Russia have done this before back in the late 1950's right? The first probe to actually impact the surface was Russia's Luna 2 launched in September of 1959. I can't remember the names of the US impact probes. The whole Moon Impact Probe is not a new idea. Though it will be very interesting to see what Japan comes up with datawise.

The Indian probe met the same end, there's really not much else you can do after a certain point.
Better to crash them on the moon instead of keeping them in a degrading orbit, and having them possibly impact future missions.

Originally posted by Pilgrum
This should lay to rest the controversy over existence of a moon atmosphere or not.

That controversy was laid to rest thousands of years ago when man first watched a star pass behind the Moon