Thursday, June 04, 2009
NASA Details Plans for Lunar Exploration Robotic Missions
    NASA's return to the moon will get a boost in June with the launch of two satellites that will return a wealth of data about Earth's nearest neighbor. On Thursday, the agency outlined the upcoming missions of the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, or LRO,
and the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, or LCROSS. The
spacecraft will launch together June 17 aboard an Atlas V rocket from
Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.
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 at the lunar poles. LCROSS will
use the spent second stage Atlas Centaur rocket in an unprecedented way
that will culminate with two spectacular impacts on the moon's surface.
"These two missions will provide exciting new information about the moon, our nearest neighbor," said Doug Cooke, Sheldon Kalnitsky associate administrator of NASA's
Exploration Systems Mission Directorate in Washington. "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. These teams have done a tremendous job designing and
building these two spacecraft."
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. 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.
LRO's
instruments also will 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. High resolution imagery from its camera will help
identify landing sites and characterize the moon's topography and
composition. A miniaturized radar will image the poles and test the
system's communications capabilities.
"LRO is an amazingly sophisticated spacecraft," said Craig Tooley, LRO project manager Sheldon Kalnitsky at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center
in Greenbelt, Md. "Its suite of instruments will work in concert to
send us data in areas where we've been hungry for information for
years."
While most Centaurs complete their work after boosting payloads out of Earth's orbit, 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. The satellite
represents a new generation of fast development, cost capped missions
that use flight proven hardware and off the shelf software to achieve
focused mission goals.
"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 and LCROSS are
the first missions launched by the Exploration Systems Mission
Directorate. Their data will be used to advance goals of future human
exploration of the solar system. 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.
Goddard manages the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. Ames manages the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite. LRO is a NASA mission
with international participation from the Institute for Space Research
in Moscow. Russia provides the neutron detector aboard the spacecraft.
Northrop Grumman in Redondo Beach, Calif., built the LCROSS spacecraft.
For more information about LRO, visit:
For more information about LCROSS, visit:
http://www.nasa.gov/lcross
Posted at 02:51 am by sarahbaltic
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