The equipment was shipped out by the National Aeronautics and Space Association's Ames research center and was en route to the Northrop Grumman Corp. (NYSE:NOC), creator of NASA's Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, NASA said in a news release.

The craft, known as LCROSS, is scheduled to launch with the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter aboard an Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral, Fla., by the end of the year.

"The goal of the mission is to confirm the presence or absence of water ice in a permanently shadowed crater at the moon's south pole," said Anthony Colaprete, LCROSS principal investigator at Ames. "The identification of water is very important to the future of human activities on the moon."