Popular Mechanics has a feature story about NASA’s plans to crash a rocket into the moon in order to search for frozen water.
Early next year, the space agency will launch its Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), which will map the moon and its resources in unprecedented detail. The Atlas rocket also will send a small sub-satellite, the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS), which will remain attached to the upper-stage Centaur booster. LCROSS will steer the booster toward a collision with one of the moon’s poles.
“Nine hours before impact, 24,000 miles above the lunar surface, LCROSS and the Centaur would separate. The 5,000-pound Centaur would crash into a dark crater at twice the speed of a rifle bullet, kicking up a plume of debris more than 6 miles high. Four minutes later, the heavily instrumented LCROSS would ride the plume, checking for water and relaying data to Earth until it, too, slammed into the lunar surface.”
ISRO to launch Chandrayaan-I in September
DailyIndia.com
India will launch its first lunar orbiter Chandrayaan-I, in September. The spacecraft will map the moon with a high-resolution high-resolution stereo camera with a resolution of 16 feet. The orbiter’s other instruments include near-infrared and X-ray spectrometers and a laser altimeter.
LRO Launch Delayed to 2009
Aerospace Daily & Defense Report
NASA will delay the launch of its Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) from November to late February or early March 2009 because of a launch conflict with the Department of Defense.
The orbiter will map the moon and collect mineralogy data. The mission has a piggyback payload, the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS), which is designed to send the rocket’s spent upper stage crashing into the moon to search for evidence of water ice.
Spaceflight Now has a great feature on the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, a NASA mission set for launch in October. LCROSS, built on a relative shoestring budget of $79 million, will guide a spent Centaur rocket stage into the moon in a search for frozen water.
“The Centaur, playing an unprecedented role in a space mission, will be used as a projectile to dive into a crater shrouded in darkness near one of the moon’s poles,” Spaceflight Now’s Stephen Clark writes. “An array of space-based telescopes and ground observatories will be used to analyze the material ejected from deep within the target crater in an effort to determine the extent of hypothesized water ice deposits there.”
