NASA took the first concrete step toward returning human beings to the moon Thursday, successfully launching the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter on a mission to find the best place to build Earth’s first off-world colony.
The 19-story-high, two-stage rocket and spacecraft launched at 5:32 EDT. As the huge first-stage Atlas V rocket roared to life at Cape Canaveral in central Florida, NASA spokesman George Diller called it “America’s first step in a lasting return to the moon.”
The $500 million orbiter will spend the next year cruising just 31 miles above the lunar surface, employing a suite of seven instruments to identify landing hazards such as rocks and craters. It will be paying particular attention to the largely unknown lunar poles, where previous missions have picked up hints that water ice may exist in some permanently shadowed craters.
Locating water on the moon would be a major discovery that would make permanent settlements much more feasible. Water would not only be useful for drinking, but it would also be invaluable as a source of oxygen for respiration and rocket fuel.
Finding water is so important that a second spacecraft is riding along with the orbiter that has no other job but to punch a hole in one of the polar craters, in hopes of sending a plume of ice and debris above the lunar surface.
Thousands of sky watchers are expected to turn their telescopes to the moon on the morning of Oct. 9, when the water-seeking satellite steers the fuel-depleted second stage Centaur rocket into a crater at 5,600 mph. For those in the western U.S., where the moon will still be up, the plume should be clearly visible with a moderately sized backyard telescope, NASA said.
“For astronomers all over the United States, this is going to be a very exciting day,” said John Marmie, deputy project manager for the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite mission. “It’s going to be a smashing success.”
About 45 minutes after liftoff, the orbiter separated from the rest of the spacecraft and entered a trajectory that will carry it to the moon in about four days. At that point, it will use its on-board thrusters to settle into a polar orbit.
Among the instruments that will be used to make the most detailed map ever of the moon’s topography is a set of lasers that will be bounced off the surface to create an image of the lunar craters, hills and boulders.
An instrument called Diviner will make the first temperature map of the moon, plumbing recesses of shadowed polar craters, where the temperature can be as cold as minus 370 degrees Fahrenheit, and the equator, where the sun’s radiation can heat the surface to 240 degrees Fahrenheit.
Meanwhile, the ice-seeking satellite began steering itself into a giant, four-month-long looping Earth orbit that will carry it past the moon three times as it lines up for the Oct. 9 collision with a crater at the south pole.
Satellite managers are looking at a region known as the Cabeus system of craters, where previous spacecraft have detected the signature of large amounts of hydrogen, a key indicator of water.
Spacecraft controllers will not make a final crater selection until 30 days before impact.
Most spacecraft separate from their rockets after the fuel is used up. In this case, however, the satellite will remain attached to the 42-foot-long Centaur shell as it lines up its target. Nine hours before impact, the satellite will swing around so that the Centaur is being steered from behind as it heads for the collision point.
Once aimed at the proper crater, the satellite will cut loose the Centaur, sending it off for the last leg of its journey. Then the satellite will slow itself down, creating a four-minute gap between the time the rocket shell and the satellite arrive at the moon.
That will allow enough time for the plume of debris to rise high enough so that the satellite can fly through it, taking measurements and looking for evidence of water, before it also crashes, about one mile away from the Centaur impact.
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