A powerful
robotic lunar scout, NASA's first in more than a decade, arrived at the moon early Tuesday
on a mission to seek out potential landing sites and hidden water ice for
future astronauts.
NASA's
Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) fired its thrusters at 5:47 a.m. EDT (0947
GMT) in a 40-minute maneuver to begin orbiting
the moon. It is NASA's first unmanned moon shot since 1998.
"We are in
lunar orbit," said LRO project scientist Richard Vondrak at NASA's Goddard
Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "We're not going past the moon. We're
there to stay."
About the
size of a Mini Cooper car, the $504 million LRO probe launched toward the moon
on June 18 and spent four days in transit - about a day longer than astronauts
on the Apollo missions in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The robotic probe is
expected to spent at least one year mapping
the moon for future manned missions, as well as several more years
conducting science surveys.
"LRO has
returned NASA to the moon," a flight controller said as NASA's LRO mission control
center erupted in applause. The probe's lunar arrival comes just under one month ahead of the 40th anniversary of NASA's first moon landing by Apollo 11 astronauts on July 20, 1969.
The
spacecraft carries
seven instruments to map the moon in unprecedented detail, seek out water
ice hidden in the permanent shadows of craters at the lunar south pole, and
measure the temperature and radiation hazards future astronauts may face. The
names of 1.6 million people are also riding aboard LRO as part of a public
outreach program.
LRO is
currently circling the moon in an extremely elliptical orbit that brings the
nearly 2-ton probe within about 124 miles (200 km) of the lunar surface at its
closest and reaches out to 1,863 miles (3,000 km).
"It went
like clockwork," said Craig Tooley, NASA's LRO project manager. "In the end, it
went exactly as planned."
Over the
next few days, more thruster firings should fine-tine the spacecraft's flight
path until it reaches its planned observation orbit of between 31 and 135 miles
(50 to 218 km). Two of LRO's seven instruments, a pair of radiation sensors,
scanned the space environment between the Earth and the moon, with the
remaining five instruments to be activated in the next few weeks.
The first
images from the powerful camera aboard LRO should be beamed back to Earth in
the next few weeks, mission managers said.
"This whole
new moon we're ready to see is out there waiting, and this mission is going to
go get it," said Jim Garvin, NASA's chief scientist at Goddard.
A second
unmanned spacecraft, the $79 million Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing
Satellite (LCROSS), also launched with LRO and is expected to slingshot past
the moon later today at about 8:20 a.m. EDT (1220 GMT). The spacecraft and an
attached empty Centaur rocket stage will fly by the moon and shift into a polar
orbit that will ultimately end in an Oct. 9 crash into a shadowed crater at the
moon's south pole to probe for hidden water ice.
NASA plans
to release live video from LCROSS as it flies past the moon at a distance of
about 5,592 miles (9,000 km), mission managers have said.
Click here for NASA's streaming video of the LCROSS lunar flyby.
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