The Lunar CRater Observations and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) mission impacted
a spent Centaur rocket stage into a permanently shadowed region near the lunar
south pole. The Sheperding Spacecraft (SSC) separated \sim9 hours before impact
and performed a small braking maneuver in order to observe the Centaur impact
plume, looking for evidence of water and other volatiles, before impacting
itself. This paper describes the registration of imagery of the LCROSS impact
region from the mid- and near-infrared cameras onboard the SSC, as well as from
the Goldstone radar. We compare the Centaur impact features, positively
identified in the first two, and with a consistent feature in the third, which
are interpreted as a 20 m diameter crater surrounded by a 160 m diameter ejecta
region. The images are registered to Lunar Reconnaisance Orbiter (LRO)
topographical data which allows determination of the impact location. This
location is compared with the impact location derived from ground-based
tracking and propagation of the spacecraft's trajectory and with locations
derived from two hybrid imagery/trajectory methods. The four methods give a
weighted average Centaur impact location of -84.6796\circ, -48.7093\circ, with
a 1{\sigma} un- certainty of 115 m along latitude, and 44 m along longitude,
just 146 m from the target impact site. Meanwhile, the trajectory-derived SSC
impact location is -84.719\circ, -49.61\circ, with a 1{\sigma} uncertainty of 3
m along the Earth vector and 75 m orthogonal to that, 766 m from the target
location and 2.803 km south-west of the Centaur impact. We also detail the
Centaur impact angle and SSC instrument pointing errors. Six high-level LCROSS
mission requirements are shown to be met by wide margins. We hope that these
results facilitate further analyses of the LCROSS experiment data and follow-up
observations of the impact region.Comment: Accepted for publication in Space Science Review. 24 pages, 9 figure
