NASA's
Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter is on track for its scheduled June 17 launch and
its mission to gather more information about the moon's poles and scout out
safe landing sites for man's return to the lunar surface.
The lunar
orbiter is NASA's vanguard mission for the agency's plan to return humans to
the moon by 2020 aboard its new Orion spacecraft and Altair lunar landers. It
will launch along with its partner, Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing
Satellite (LCROSS)
which will slam into the moon's surface as part of a hunt for water ice.
LRO's
launch has been delayed
several times due to a crowded launch schedule, but is finally scheduled to
take off next month aboard an aboard an Atlas V rocket.
Using a
suite of seven instruments, LRO will help identify safe landing sites for
future human explorers, locate potential resources, characterize the radiation
environment and test new technology. LCROSS will seek a definitive answer about
the presence of water ice in permanently shaded areas of the lunar poles.
"These
two missions will provide exciting new information about the moon, our nearest
neighbor," said Doug Cooke, associate administrator of NASA's Exploration
Systems Mission Directorate in Washington, D.C. "Imaging will show
dramatic landscapes and areas of interest down to one-meter resolution. The
data also will provide information about potential new uses of the moon."
LRO's
instruments will help scientists compile high resolution, three-dimensional
maps of the lunar surface and also survey it in the far ultraviolet spectrum.
While the
Apollo missions provided detailed maps of the moon's equatorial regions, good
maps of the poles are lacking, said Craig Tooley, LRO project manager at NASA's
Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.
"We
have much better maps of mars than we have of our own moon's polar regions,"
he said.
The satellite's
instruments will help explain how the lunar radiation environment may
affect humans and measure radiation absorption with a plastic that is like
human tissue.
The probe's
instruments will also allow scientists to explore the moon's deepest craters,
look beneath its surface for clues to the location of water ice, and identify
and explore both permanently lit and permanently shadowed regions.
"LRO
is an amazingly sophisticated spacecraft," Tooley said. "Its suite of
instruments will work in concert to send us data in areas where we've been
hungry for information for years."
A NASA
radar aboard India's Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft has already
taken a glimpse inside the dark craters.
LCROSS will
use the second stage Atlas Centaur rocket in a completely new way: The LCROSS
Centaur will journey with the spacecraft for four months and be guided to
an impact in a permanently shadowed crater at one of the moon's poles.
The
resulting debris plume is expected to rise more than six miles. It presents a
dynamic observation target for LCROSS as well as a network of ground-based
telescopes, LRO, and possibly the Hubble Space Telescope.
Observers
will search for evidence of water ice by examining the plume in direct
sunlight.
LCROSS also
will increase knowledge of the mineralogical makeup of some of the remote polar
craters that sunlight never reaches.
"We
look forward to engaging a wide cross section of the public in LCROSS'
spectacular arrival at the moon and search for water ice," said LCROSS
Project Manager Dan Andrews of NASA's Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif. "It's possible we'll learn the answer to what is increasingly one of planetary
science's most intriguing questions."
LRO will
spend at least one year in low polar orbit around the moon, collecting detailed
information for exploration purposes before being transferred to NASA's Science
Mission Directorate to continue collecting additional scientific data.
The total
cost of the entire mission, including launch delays, is $504 million, NASA
officials said.
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