Hours after a NASA spacecraft settled into lunar orbit, a sister mission is set to swing by the moon. The Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, or LCROSS, launched last Thursday from Cape Canaveral with the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, or LRO.
Still hitched to the Centaur upper stage of an Atlas V rocket, LCROSS will swing by the moon to help establish trajectories for planned October collisions with a lunar crater.
Starting at 8:20 a.m. EDT, click here to watch a live, hourlong video stream of the event from NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif.
It's expected to show the spacecraft's view of the moon from a distance of more than 5,000 miles.
LCROSS made its closest approach to the moon - about 2,000 miles from the surface - at 6:30 a.m. EDT.
LCROSS and the Centaur will orbit Earth for about four months. Then they'll separate, and both will plunge toward a crater near the moon's south pole. Impacts spaced four minutes apart are scheduled the morning of Oct. 9.
The $79-million mission is an effort to confirm if water might be trapped at the bottom of freezing craters that lie in permanent shadow.
The swingby will start near the lunar south pole and continue north along the far side of the moon, NASA says.
LRO reached lunar orbit just after 6 a.m. today. It will spend a year mapping the moon is great detail to identify safe landing sites and interesting areas for exploration by astronauts.
Image: Click to enlarge the artist's rendering of the LCROSS spacecraft and Centaur separation, planned in October. Credit: NASA.
2 comments:
Since when is the moon a planet? Planets orbit suns, moons orbit planets.
Anonymous: thanks and pardon the sloppy wording, which has been rephrased.
Post a Comment