Live: LRO set to enter lunar orbit

NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which launched Thursday from Cape Canaveral atop an Atlas V rocket, is about to enter orbit around the moon.

"This is the moment that we've all been waiting for," said Cathy Peddie, deputy project manager for the LRO mission at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. "This is just a tremendous moment for all of us."

You can watch live commentary here - click on the big picture above or the NASA TV still image on the right side of the page to launch a NASA TV viewer.

The insertion event features a 40-minute engine burn by the spacecraft, scheduled to begin at 5:47 a.m.

Smaller correction burns may be made over the next several days that will adjust LRO's commissioning orbit, where it will spend two months turning on and testing its instruments.

LRO is a $511-million mission intended to pave the way for astronauts' return to the moon as soon as 2020.

The orbiter will create detailed maps to identify landing sites and resources on the moon, focusing on the poles, which are relatively unknown and poorly mapped.

It will also measure the radiation environment explorers living on an outpost might face.

A second spacecraft that launched with LRO, NASA's $79-million Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, or LCROSS, is scheduled to swing by the moon later this morning.

Click here to watch the live video stream from the Science Operations Center at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., starting at 8:20 a.m.

LCROSS and the Atlas V's Centaur upper stage are scheduled to crash into a south pole lunar crater in October.

The missions are NASA's first to the moon since 1998.