Watch Live: NASA probe nearing lunar orbit

NASA's first spacecraft to visit the moon in more than a decade is on track to settle into lunar orbit early Tuesday, completing a 41/2-day voyage from the Space Coast.

The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter is scheduled to fire its engines continuously for 40 minutes starting at 5:47 a.m., putting it in position to be captured by the moon's gravity.

You can watch live coverage of the event here starting at 5:30 a.m. Just click on the NASA TV still image on the right side of the page to launch a viewer.

The coverage will include animations and live interviews with mission managers and scientists at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

The orbiter is preparing to start a yearlong, $511-million mapping mission to identify safe landing sites and interesting areas for exploration for human flights planned as early as 2020.

First, the spacecraft will spend two months in an elliptical orbit testing its systems and seven science instruments, which will detail the lunar surface's topography, temperatures, resources and radiation exposure.

When that commissioning phase is complete, the orbiter will drop down to about 30 miles above the planet, circling its poles.

The orbiter launched at 5:32 p.m. Thursday from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station atop an unmanned United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket.

A second spacecraft that shared the ride, NASA's $79-million Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, or LCROSS, is scheduled to swing by the moon a few hours after the orbiter and beam back views from more than 5,000 miles away.

Click here to watch the live video stream from the Science Operations Center at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif. It's expected to start at 8:20 a.m. and last about an hour.

LCROSS will drag the rocket's Centaur upper stage around Earth for about four months before both smash into the moon's south pole in an effort to find water ice. The impacts are scheduled Oct. 9.

The swingby helps to establish the trajectory necessary for the collisions and to calibrate the spacecraft's science instruments.

It will begin near the lunar south pole and swing north along the far side of the moon, NASA says.

IMAGE NOTE: Artist rendering of the LRO spacecraft. Credit: NASA. Below, on June 18, trailing a column of fire, the Atlas V/Centaur carrying NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, or LRO, and NASA's Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, known as LCROSS, raced above the lightning tower at left on Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. LRO and LCROSS are the first missions in NASA's plan to return humans to the moon and begin establishing a lunar outpost by 2020. The LRO also includes seven instruments that will help NASA characterize the moon's surface: DIVINER, LAMP, LEND, LOLA , CRATER, Mini-RF and LROC. Launch was on-time at 5:32 p.m. EDT. Photo credit: NASA/Sandra Joseph, Tony Gray.