Lunar Exploration

[Cyberian]

LADEE Arrives at Wallops for Moon Mission
Monday Jun 10, 2013

The NASA Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) arrived today at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility to begin final processing for its trip to the moon later this year.

LADEE is a robotic mission that will orbit the moon to gather detailed information about the lunar atmosphere, conditions near the surface and environmental influences on lunar dust.

A thorough understanding of these characteristics will address long-standing unknowns, and help scientists understand other planetary bodies as well. LADEE has three science instruments and one technology demonstration onboard.

LADEE's scheduled Sep. 5, 2013, launch will mark several firsts. It will be the first payload to launch on a U.S. Air Force Minotaur V rocket integrated by Orbital Sciences Corp., and the first deep space mission to launch from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center's Wallops Flight Facility.

NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington funds the LADEE mission, a cooperative effort led by NASA's Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif.

Ames is responsible for managing the mission, building the spacecraft and performing mission operations. NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md., is responsible for managing the science instruments and technology demonstration payload, and the science operations center.

Wallops is responsible for launch vehicle integration, launch services, and launch range operations. NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Ala., manages LADEE within the Lunar Quest Program Office.

www.moondaily.com/m/reports/LADEE_Arrives_at_Wallops_for_Moon_Mission_999.html

 

[Cyberian]

Australian team maps Moon's hidden craters
Tuesday June 18, 2013

Australian scientists Tuesday said they had identified a possible 280 additional craters on the Moon, a finding they said could shed light on the history of the Earth's natural satellite.

By combining gravity and topography data collected by satellites, the scientists from Curtin University in Western Australia were able to use computer modelling to at first identify two basins on the far side of the Moon.

They later developed a high-resolution image to find a total of 280 "candidate basins" which they suspect are craters.

"There are many more (craters) that have been mapped from optical observations or from just the shape of the topography," researcher Will Featherstone told AFP.

"So there's many, many craters that were already known, we've just been able to apply this technique to enhance the ones that aren't so easy to see.

"What we have been able to use is the topography and the gravity together to get a stronger indication that there is something there that needs further investigation."

Featherstone said the researchers looked at the lunar surface on both the near and far sides of the Moon, the dark side being more challenging because satellites cannot be tracked from Earth when they are on that side.

To get around this, the researchers used data gathered from a mission which used multiple satellites which were tracking each other as they circled the Moon.

"So when the satellite orbiting the Moon went behind the far side and they couldn't be seen from Earth, they could be seen by other satellites," he said.

Featherstone said of the 280 possible craters, the researchers had classified 66 of them as distinctly visible according to both gravity and topography.

"Scientists can, instead of looking at every square inch of the Moon looking for basins, they can target these areas," he said.

"It just helps investigations of the Moon and the history of the Moon and the solar system," he added.

The team has also done some work on the gravity of Mars and Featherstone said other data sets were also available for Venus and other planets.

He said scientists were optimistic about further discoveries from applying their techniques to new gravity data from NASA's GRAIL mission, which ended in late 2012 when the two satellites - named Ebb and Flow - were deliberately crashed on the Moon.

Australian team maps Moon's hidden craters

 

[Indiankid]

LADEE Arrives at Wallops for Moon Mission
Monday Jun 10, 2013


The NASA Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) arrived today at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility to begin final processing for its trip to the moon later this year.

LADEE is a robotic mission that will orbit the moon to gather detailed information about the lunar atmosphere, conditions near the surface and environmental influences on lunar dust.

A thorough understanding of these characteristics will address long-standing unknowns, and help scientists understand other planetary bodies as well. LADEE has three science instruments and one technology demonstration onboard.

LADEE's scheduled Sep. 5, 2013, launch will mark several firsts. It will be the first payload to launch on a U.S. Air Force Minotaur V rocket integrated by Orbital Sciences Corp., and the first deep space mission to launch from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center's Wallops Flight Facility.

NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington funds the LADEE mission, a cooperative effort led by NASA's Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif.

Ames is responsible for managing the mission, building the spacecraft and performing mission operations. NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md., is responsible for managing the science instruments and technology demonstration payload, and the science operations center.

Wallops is responsible for launch vehicle integration, launch services, and launch range operations. NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Ala., manages LADEE within the Lunar Quest Program Office.

Thanks for the Info. I'm eagerly waiting for Chandrayaan-2

 

[Cyberian]

Thanks for the Info. I'm eagerly waiting for Chandrayaan-2

Has a firm date for the launch been set?

 

[Indiankid]

Has a firm date for the launch been set?

Not yet! but expected to be in 2015.The delay is because the Russians are unable to supply the lunar lander on time,so that we have to design & make it ourselves.The design was already completes by Space Applications Centre in Ahmedabad.

 

[Marshmallow]

relatd to Moon

What is a Super Moon?

for all science students

@Ayush @Talon @arp2041 @A.Rafay @Dillinger @nuclearpak @S.U.R.B. @Slav Defence @jaibi @Secur @Hermione G @Jazzbot @Aka123 @Aeronaut @balixd

 

[Cyberian]

Scientists use gravity, topographic data to find unmapped moon craters
Wednesday June 19, 2013

Australian scientists say they've used ultra-high resolution mapping techniques to identify 280 craters on the moon that have never been mapped before.

Researchers at Curtin University in Western Australia used computer modeling of lunar gravity and topographic data to explore detailed basins that would be obscured using other methods, China's Xinhua News Agency reported Tuesday.

After an original identification of two basins on the lunar far side, the researchers extended their search efforts to the entire surface of the moon, Will Featherstone, a professor at Curtin's Institute for Geoscience Research, said.

The crater search was not without its difficulties, he said.

"The dark side of the moon is particularly challenging because moon-orbiting satellites cannot be tracked from Earth when they are over the far side," Featherstone said.

The technique was fine-tuned in an initial development of an ultra-high resolution gravity map of Earth, researchers said.

Scientists use gravity, topographic data to find unmapped moon craters

 

[Cyberian]

Metamorphosis of Moon's Water Ice Explained
Friday Jun 21, 2013

CRaTER. Credit: NASA/Debbie McCallum.

Using data gathered by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) mission, scientists have explained how energetic particles penetrating lunar soil can create molecular hydrogen from water ice. The finding provides insight into how radiation can change the chemistry of water ice throughout the solar system.

Space scientists from the University of New Hampshire, in Durham, and NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., have published their results online in the Journal of Geophysical Research Planets.

Discovering molecular hydrogen on the moon was a surprise result from NASA's Lunar Crater Observation Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) mission, which crash-landed the LCROSS satellite's Centaur rocket into the Cabeus crater in the permanently shadowed region of the moon. These regions have never been exposed to sunlight and have remained at temperatures near absolute zero for billions of years, preserving the pristine nature of the lunar soil, or regolith.

Instruments on board LCROSS trained on the resulting immense debris plume detected water vapor and water ice, the mission's hoped-for quarry, while LRO, already in orbit around the moon, saw molecular hydrogen.

"LRO's Lyman Alpha Mapping Project, or LAMP, detected the signature of molecular hydrogen, which was unexpected and unexplained," said Andrew Jordan, research scientist and lead author of the paper from the University of New Hampshire's Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans, and Space.

"After the finding, there were a couple of ideas for how molecular hydrogen could be formed but none of them seemed to work for the conditions in the crater or with the rocket impact." Jordan said.

"Our analysis shows that the galactic cosmic rays, which are charged particles energetic enough to penetrate below the lunar surface, can dissociate the water, H2O, into H2 through various potential pathways."

The analysis was based on data gathered by the Cosmic Ray Telescope for the Effects of Radiation (CRaTER) instrument aboard the LRO spacecraft. CRaTER characterizes the global lunar radiation environment by measuring radiation dose rates from galactic cosmic rays and solar energetic particles.

"We used the CRaTER measurements to get a handle on how much molecular hydrogen has been formed from the water ice via charged particles," said Jordan. Jordan's computer model incorporated the CRaTER data and showed that these energetic particles can form between 10 and 100 percent of the H2 measured by LAMP.

The study notes that narrowing down that percent range requires particle accelerator experiments on water ice to more accurately gauge the number of chemical reactions that result per unit of energy deposited by cosmic rays and solar energetic particles.

"This result indicates the importance of radiation exposure to the volatile chemicals stored in lunar cold traps, which has implications for our understanding of the history of the solar system as well as its future exploration," said Timothy Stubbs, research scientist and co-author on the paper from NASA Goddard.

LRO is managed by Goddard. To view the paper, visit here.

Metamorphosis of Moon's Water Ice Explained