NASA Moon Mission Delayed Almost A Month

NASA's first mission in a bid to return to the moon is being pushed back almost a month due to a delay in a military satellite launch and precise timing required for the lunar mission.

NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter now is being targeted for launch May 20 aboard an Atlas V rocket at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. The moon mapper and a piggyback payload that will search for polar ice had been slated to fly on April 24.

Launch of the mission must be timed to put both the orbiter and its companion spacecraft on the proper course to achieve science objectives. Two- to three-day launch opportunities come up about every two weeks.

NASA was forced to forego a planned April 24 launch as well as a launch opportunity between May 7 and May 9 when the planned May 9 launch of another Atlas V with a military communications satellite slipped to March 13.

NASA had considered trying to launch the moon mission during the early May window but ultimately decided that Atlas turnaround operations would make the schedule too tight.

NASA earlier this week set March 12 as a tentative launch date for shuttle Discovery's International Space Station assembly mission. But the agency has yet to officially book the date on the Air Force Eastern Range, which provides tracking, range safety, weather forecasting and launch scheduling services for all missions from Kennedy Space Center and Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.

The U.S. Air Force would have to agree to push back the March 13 Atlas V launch for Disvovery to fly on March 12. It typically takes two days to reset range systems for the launch of different vehicles.

The mission will be the first to fly since President Bush in 2004 directed NASA to return astronauts to the moon by 2020. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter will map the lunar surface and scout for safe landing sites in areas where NASA might locate a future moon base.

The secondary payload -- dubbed the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, or LCROSS -- will comprise the Atlas V's Centaur upper stage and a shepherding satellite.

The Centaur will be sent on a suicide dive into a dark, shadowed crater at one of the moon's poles, kicking up a large cloud of debris. The instrumented satellite will fly through the debris plume and gather data on its contents for scientists back on Earth.

The aim is to confirm the presence or absence of water ice in the crater. NASA's Lunar Prospector found evidence of concentrated stores of hydrogen at the poles, a sign that water ice might be harbored there. Water ice could be used at a moon base to generate water and breathing air for colonists.

The Atlas V slated to blast off from Launch Complex 41 on March 13 will carry the Wideband Global SATCOM-2 satellite. The spacecraft is the second in a series of next-generation military communications satellites designed to augment and eventually replace aging Defense Satellite Communication System spacecraft that have been the Pentagon's orbital workhorses for more than two decades.