NASA’s recent lunar-punch mission apparently was not the high-profile flop it first appeared.

Officials at Ames Research Center in Northern California, which managed the mission, have released images that clearly show a plume of debris emanating from the Cabeus crater shortly after the NASA rocket plowed into it.

Creating a plume was key to the mission’s success because the goal was to measure dust kicked up to find out if ice might lie hidden in polar craters that haven’t seen sunlight in billions of years.

To do that, the accompanying $79 million Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite was to fly through the debris cloud so its spectrometers and cameras could sample the lunar dust.

The plume was estimated to reach a height of about a mile above the lunar surface.

Everything appeared to go as planned in the early morning hours of Oct. 9, except that no debris plume appeared as the LCROSS satellite followed the Centaur into the crater.

Hundreds of members of the public, who had gathered at Ames’ campus in Mountain View, Calif., to watch the 4:30 a.m. event on a huge outdoor movie screen, were disappointed to see only a close-up of the craggy lunar surface before the screen went black when the satellite crashed.

At the time, NASA scientists said they hoped the problem was simply that cameras on board the satellite were not properly adjusted to detect the plume. But some scientists feared the Centaur might have hit bedrock and failed to create a plume.

The new images, lifted from a different camera aboard the spacecraft, show that a plume did in fact occur. That means the satellite should have been capable of detecting water, if it was present.

“We are blown away by the data returned,” Tony Colaprete, the mission’s top scientist, said in a statement. “The team is working hard on the analysis, and the data appear to be of very high quality.”

Colaprete said it was too early to say what the plume contained. But he said several clues, including the temperature of the flash created by the crash, will help scientists answer that question in coming weeks.

Finding significant amounts of water on the moon would be a major discovery, making eventual colonization easier than it would be if settlers had to transport water from Earth.

In media coverage before the impact, many observers said they were disappointed at the lack of spectacle.

No fireworks

But scientists said the mission was carried out for “a scientific purpose, not to put on a fireworks display for the public,” said space consultant Alan Stern, a former NASA associate administrator for science.

But Michio Kaku, a professor at the City College of New York and host of “Sci Q Sundays” on the Science Channel, said NASA may be jumping the gun in calling the results “a smashing success,” acting in response to public criticism of the mission.

“To be a spectacular success, we had to find large quantities of underground ice,” Kaku told The Associated Press on Saturday. He said scientists still have more work to do to analyze the data for the presence of ice or water.

“They got beautiful pictures of the event, but that’s not why we spent $79 million,” Kaku said. “Ice on the moon is more valuable than gold.”

The crashes created a man-made crater about one-fifth the size of a football field, Brown University geologist and LCROSS scientist Peter Schultz said.