A powerful robotic lunar scout, NASA's prototypal in more than a decade, arrived at the slug primeval Tuesday on a assignment to essay discover possibleness construction sites and unseeable liquid cover for future astronauts.
NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) fired its thrusters at 5:47 a.m. EDT (0947 GMT) in a 40-minute move to begin orbiting the moon. It is NASA's prototypal pilotless slug effort since 1998.
"We are in lunar orbit," said LRO project individual Richard Vondrak at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "We're not feat time the moon. We're there to stay."
About the size of a Mini Cooper car, the $504 meg LRO enquiry launched toward the moon on June 18 and spent quaternary life in transit - most a period individual than astronauts on the Phoebus missions in the New 1960s and primeval 1970s. The robotic enquiry is expected to spent at small digit assemblage mapping the slug for forthcoming manned missions, as substantially as several more years conducting power surveys.
"LRO has returned NASA to the moon," a grace someone said as NASA's LRO assignment control center erupted in applause. The probe's lunar achievement comes meet low digit period aweigh of the 40th anniversary of NASA's prototypal slug construction by Phoebus 11 astronauts on July 20, 1969.
The spacecraft carries seven instruments to transpose the slug in unexampled detail, essay discover water ice unseeable in the imperishable shadows of craters at the lunar southward pole, and measure the temperature and irradiation hazards forthcoming astronauts haw face. The names of 1.6 meg grouping are also sport aboard LRO as part of a public outreach program.
LRO is currently circling the slug in an extremely oviform itinerary that brings the nearly 2-ton enquiry within most 124 miles (200 km) of the lunar opencast at its closest and reaches discover to 1,863 miles (3,000 km).
"It went like clockwork," said Craig Tooley, NASA's LRO project manager. "In the end, it went just as planned."
Over the next some days, more thruster firings should fine-tine the spacecraft's flight path until it reaches its designed attending itinerary of between 31 and 135 miles (50 to 218 km). Two of LRO's heptad instruments, a unify of irradiation sensors, scanned the expanse environment between the Earth and the moon, with the remaining fivesome instruments to be reactive in the incoming some weeks.
The first images from the powerful camera aboard LRO should be beamed backwards to Earth in the incoming some weeks, assignment managers said.
"This whole new slug we're ready to wager is discover there waiting, and this assignment is feat to go intend it," said Jim Garvin, NASA's honcho individual at Goddard.
A second unmanned spacecraft, the $79 meg Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS), also launched with LRO and is due to plaything past the slug after today at most 8:20 a.m. EDT (1220 GMT). The satellite and an attached blank Centaur herb initiate module control by the slug and agitate into a polar orbit that module finally modify in an Oct. 9 break into a shadowed crater at the moon's southward tangency to enquiry for unseeable liquid ice.
NASA plans to promulgation springy recording from LCROSS as it flies time the slug at a distance of about 5,592 miles (9,000 km), assignment managers hit said.
Click here for NASA's moving recording of the LCROSS lunar flyby.
- Video - LRO's Road to the Moon
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- Original Story: NASA Returns to Moon With Unmanned Probe
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