LRO, LCROSS To Probe Moon
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By Michael Mecham
Another pair of visitors to the moon got a clean liftoff June 18 on a United Launch Alliance Atlas V, as NASA looks for safe landing sites and extends its search for water.
It will take four days for the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) to achieve its polar mapping orbit of the moon, which it will occupy over the next year in a position of continuous sun. The orbit will be from just 50 kilometers (30 miles) above the surface.
Developed by NASA's Exploration Systems Mission directorate to create detailed maps for a moon base already in development, LRO will join India's Chandrayaan and China's Change'e missions. NASA's science team has been coordinating with them and with Japan's Kaguya mapper, which was deliberately plunged into the lunar surface earlier this month after completing its mapping mission (Aerospace DAILY, June 12).
One task for LRO, which is managed by Goddard Space Flight Center, is to determine how much the moon has changed since earlier mapping missions prepared the way for Apollo. LRO's June 18 launch was a month and two days shy of the 40th anniversary of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin's visit to the Sea of Tranquility.
The mission has an unusual feature: rather than separating from the Atlas' Centaur upper stage, the Centaur will be brought along to serve a big role for the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS).
In October, the Centaur will be targeted into the bottom of a shallow crater yet to be chosen in the moon's south polar region. Coming in at an 85-degree angle, the Centaur is expected to kick up a spray of regolith that LCROSS's five cameras will image as it follows four minutes behind (Aerospace DAILY, June 18).
The goal is to search for evidence of water ice and/or hydrogen frozen in the shadowed soils of the crater. LCROSS is a NASA Ames Research Center/Northrop Grumman mission.
LCROSS will meet its own doom in a slightly off center target. Observatories around the world, including five on Mauna Kea in Hawaii, and four in California, New Mexico and Arizona will image the impact plume in optical and infrared. Also serving as LCROSS observers will be the Hubble Space Telescope, Sweden's Oden and Chandrayaan.
Artist's concept of LRO: NASA
