NASA launches mission to explore moon
LOS ANGELES - NASA took the first step toward returning human beings to the moon yesterday, successfully launching the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter on a mission to find the best place to build Earth’s first off-world colony.
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 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.
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.
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.
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. A set of cameras will also take pictures capable of resolving details less than 1 yard across.
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, and the equator, where the sun’s radiation can heat the surface to 240 degrees. 