NASA Moon Mission Slips to June

The launch from Cape Canaveral of an unmanned NASA probe that will map lunar landing sites has been moved from May to early June, the agency has confirmed.

The date change from May 21 to no earlier than June 2 allows the mission more flexibility following this Friday's scheduled launch of a military communications satellite on a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket.

NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter mission, also launching on an Atlas V, would have no days to spare even if the Wideband Global SATCOM-2 satellite, or WGS-2, launches as planned on Friday.

The scrub of a March 17 WGS-2 launch attempt because of an oxidizer leak in the rocket's Centaur upper stage made the May timeline too tight.

"With the WGS launch moving out to Friday from its original launch date, it left us with zero days of contingency, and we didn't want to go into that flow with no contingency time," said George Diller, a spokesman at Kennedy Space Center.

Diller said the specific launch date in June would be refined based on the mission's science goals.

Possible days early in the month include the 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 6th. More opportunities arise in the third week of June.

The lunar orbiter will spend a year mapping the moon for potential landing sites for astronauts, who are scheduled to return around 2020. Read a fact sheet here.

A secondary payload is the Lunar CRater Observation and Sensing Satellite. The spacecraft and the Atlas V Centaur upper stage will crash in to the moon and record data from the plume created by the impact.

The goal is to confirm the presence or absence of water ice in a permanently shadowed crater near a lunar pole, NASA says. Read a fact sheet here.

IMAGE NOTE: Above, the United Launch Alliance Atlas V payload fairing for NASA's Lunar Reconaissance Orbiter arrived at Astrotech in Titusville, Fla. Below, the orbiter is on a turn-over fixture at Astrotech. The device is used to point the instruments toward the floor so optical instruments can be checked. Source: NASA.