"Luna" January 1998
Lunar Prospector Orbiting Moon!
All systems A-OK - great results expected soon
NASA's Lunar Prospector probe is finally in orbit around the Moon after a successful launch on from Complex 46 at Cape Canaveral atop a 3-stage Lockheed Martin Athena II. It is America's first fully dedicated unmanned lunar probe to be launched from the US since Surveyor 7 was launched in January 1968, 30 years ago. TV viewers in the UK who stayed up late into the small hours of 7 January were treated to a live view of the blast off, courtesy of BBC News.
Prospector's primary mission goals are to:
Search for lunar hydrogen and water
Prospector carries no conventional cameras. It is equipped with a gamma ray and alpha particle spectrometer, a magnetometer and electron reflectometer plus a precision clock. The probe will fly a 100 km polar orbit about the Moon to investigate the possibility of water ice in permanently shadowed craters near the Moon's poles. If water ice is discovered on the Moon then there is every chance that this rare lunar resource will be utilised by future manned missions. Prospector will remain in lunar orbit for about one exciting year, during which period we will obtain our best global maps of the Moon's geology and mineralogy.
During the first year of its mission Prospector will be orbiting the Moon in just under 2 hours. Apart from short interruptions caused by occasional orbital corrections, a continual flow of information about our satellite will be transmitted at a rate of 3.6 Kb per second. Near the end of its operational lifetime in orbit around the Moon, Lunar Prospector will swoop down into a low orbit, just ten kilometres above the barren grey lunar landscape, to commence a final series of detailed observations.
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