Mound-Bound Twins Set For Trip To Pad

Twin moon-bound NASA spacecraft will truck out to a launch pad early next week, setting the stage for the final Delta II rocket launch from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.

Now at the Astrotech Space Operations processing facility in south Titusville, the spacecraft are slated to launch 8:37 a.m. Sept. 8 on a $496 million moon-mapping mission.

Flying in formation in lunar orbit, the spacecraft will produce a high-quality map of the moon’s gravity field and determine the structure of its interior from crust to core.

NASA Program Manager David Lehman of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., said the spacecraft are identical.

“They are mirror images of each other,” said Sami Asmar, NASA’s project scientist at JPL.

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