The mission spent one year in a 30 - 70 km altitude lunar polar orbit, called the exploration phase of the mission. It entered an initial 5 hour orbit with a periselene altitude of roughly 100 km which was lowered into a 50 km circular orbit. LRO was put into a direct insertion trajectory and reached the Moon on 23 June at 09:43 UT (5:43 a.m. LRO launched along with its companion spacecraft, the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS), from Kennedy Space Center on 18 June 2009 on an Atlas 5 401 launch vehicle at 21:32 UT (5:32 p.m. A primary goal of the mission is to find landing sites suitable for in situ resource utilization (ISRU). The following measurements have the highest priority: characterization of deep space radiation environment in lunar orbit geodetic global topography high spatial resolution hydrogen mapping temperature mapping in polar shadowed regions imaging of surface in permanently shadowed regions identification of putative deposits of appreciable near-surface water ice in polar cold traps assessment of meter and smaller scale features for landing sites and characterization of polar region lighting environment. In September 2010, the probe wrapped this mission up and shifted into more of a pure science mode to help scientists better understand Earth’s nearest neighbor.Įven before the latest data release, LRO had delivered in a big way, helping researchers generate the most detailed map of the lunar surface ever made.The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), the first mission of NASA's Robotic Lunar Exploration Program, is designed to map the surface of the Moon and characterize future landing sites in terms of terrain roughness, usable resources, and radiation environment with the ultimate goal of facilitating the return of humans to the Moon. The spacecraft circles the Moon in a polar orbit, at an altitude of about 50 kilometers.įor the first year of its operational life, LRO spent most of its time scouting the Moon to help NASA plan for future lunar exploration missions. LRO is about the size of a small car and is equipped with seven instruments to observe the Moon.
LCROSS crashed into a shadowed crater at the Moon’s south pole in October 2009 in a hunt for water ice, which it found. NASA launched the $504 million LRO spacecraft in June 2009 along with a piggyback probe called LCROSS. “The LROC map products being released over the next week will not only serve the lunar science community for years to come, but also provide a roadmap for human exploration of our nearest neighbor,” LROC principal investigator Mark Robinson, of Arizona State University, said in a statement. Also released were higher-resolution maps of selected parts of the Moon, which were stitched together from observations taken by LROC’s two Narrow Angle Cameras, researchers said.Īnd there are more Moon maps and mosaics yet to come. When taken altogether, LRO’s seven science instruments delivered more than 192 terabytes of data in the new release - enough to fill about 41,000 DVDs, NASA officials said.Īmong the new LROC data products is a global lunar map with a resolution of 100 meters per pixel. The LROC observations are just one small part of a huge mound of orbiter data released March 14. The new image was built using data from LRO’s Wide Angle Camera, one of the three imaging tools on the spacecraft’s main Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC). But basaltic volcanism was much more limited on the far side, and as a result the region sports just a few isolated maria, researchers have said. Widespread basaltic plains called “maria,” deposited by volcanic activity long ago, cover much of the near side.
Since then, scientists have learned that the far side of the Moon is a very different place than the near side. The far side - sometimes incorrectly referred to as the “dark side” - remained hidden from human eyes until 1959, when the Soviet Luna 3 spacecraft first snapped photos of it. Tidal forces between the Moon and Earth have affected the Moon’s rotation such that the satellite now only presents one side of itself to us, which scientists call the near side. The new picture provides the most complete look at the history and composition of the Moon’s far side to date, and should serve as a valuable resource for the scientific community, researchers said. The photo, which was released along with a flood of other data from the spacecraft in mid-March, is actually a mosaic of thousands of different lunar far side images taken by the LRO’s Wide Angle Camera. NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) has created the most detailed view yet of the far side of the Moon.
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