This Friday, the LCROSS satellite, along with its booster rocket, will crash into the moon in search of water. Here is how NASA hopes the event will unfold:

The impact will occur in the Cabeus crater on the moon’s south pole at 7:30AM Eastern, 4:30AM Pacific on October 9.

You can watch the event on NASA TV (if your cable provider offers it), or you can see it here:

LCROSS Special Event

The LIVE Feeds for the LCROSS Impacts will commence approximately one hour prior to the impacts at around 1030 UTC (6:30 AM Eastern, 3:30 AM Pacific) on 09 October, 2009

According to NASA you can watch it yourself if you have a 10-inch telescope and you live on the West coast:

LCROSS Viewer’s Guide

The actual impacts commence at 4:30 am PDT (11:30 UT). The Centaur rocket will strike first, transforming 2200 kg of mass and 10 billion joules of kinetic energy into a blinding flash of heat and light. Researchers expect the impact to throw up a plume of debris as high as 10 km.

Close behind, the LCROSS mothership will photograph the collision for NASA TV and then fly right through the debris plume. Onboard spectrometers will analyze the sunlit plume for signs of water (H2O), water fragments (OH), salts, clays, hydrated minerals and assorted organic molecules.

“If there’s water there, or anything else interesting, we’ll find it,” says Tony Colaprete of NASA Ames, the mission’s principal investigator.