LRO Arrives At Moon

NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) entered orbit around the moon the morning of June 23 after a four-and-a-half day journey from Earth, marking the agency's first trip back to Earth's natural satellite in more than a decade.

Controllers at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., confirmed a successful lunar orbit insertion at 6:27 a.m. EDT. Launch took place on an Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral, Fla., on June 18.

The spacecraft will perform four engine burns over the next four days to put itself into its commissioning phase orbit, at which point its seven instruments will be checked out. Commissioning should be over by mid-August.

LRO is slated to orbit the moon at 31 miles (50 kilometers) for one year. High resolution imagery from LRO's camera will help identify landing sites for future explorers and characterize the moon's topography and composition, NASA says. The hydrogen concentrations at the moon's poles will be mapped in detail, pinpointing the locations of possible water ice, and a miniaturized radar system will image the poles and test communication capabilities.

Developed by NASA's Exploration Systems Mission directorate, LRO joins India's Chandrayaan and China's Change'e lunar missions. The last NASA mission to the moon was Lunar Prospector, which launched in January 1998.

LRO launched with a companion satellite, the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS), which performed a close swingby of the moon the morning of June 23 to put itself into an elongated polar Earth orbit and position itself to deliberately impact the lunar surface in October along with the spent Centaur upper stage of the mission's Atlas V rocket. Scientists will scan the impact plume with ground- and space-based cameras for signs of hydrogen and water ice.

More information on LRO can be found at http://www.nasa.gov/lro.

Artist's concept of LRO: NASA