LCROSS Sensors Will Fly On Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter
Cameras and sensors that will look
for the presence of water on the moon have completed validation
tests and been shipped to the manufacturer of NASA's Lunar Crater
Observation and Sensing Satellite.
The science instruments for the satellite, which is known as
LCROSS, departed NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, CA
for the Northrop Grumman Corporation's facility in Redondo Beach,
CA to be integrated with the spacecraft. LCROSS is scheduled to
launch with the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter aboard an Atlas V
rocket from Cape Canaveral, FL by the end of 2008.
"The goal of the mission is to confirm the presence or absence
of water ice in a permanently shadowed crater at the moon's south
pole," said Anthony Colaprete, LCROSS principal investigator at
Ames. "The identification of water is very important to the future
of human activities on the moon."
In 2009, LCROSS will separate into two parts and create a pair
of impacts on the permanently dark floor of one of the moon's polar
craters. The spent Centaur upper stage of the Atlas V rocket will
hit the moon, causing an explosion of material from the crater's
surface. The instruments aboard the satellite will analyze the
plume for the presence of water ice or water vapor, hydrocarbons
and hydrated materials. The satellite then will fly through the
plume on a collision course with the lunar surface. Both impacts
will be visible to Earth and lunar-orbiting instruments.
Northrop Grumman is designing and building the spacecraft. After
installing the instruments on the satellite, Northrop Grumman will
test the entire spacecraft system to ensure it is flight
worthy.
During development of the LCROSS payload, Ames engineers and
scientists built new spaceflight hardware and used new testing
procedures to take advantage of lower cost, commercially available
instruments. The team subjected the commercial instruments and
NASA-developed components to conditions simulating the harsh
environment of spaceflight. Working closely with the commercial
instrument manufacturers, all safety and operational concerns were
addressed quickly and efficiently.
"This payload delivery represents a new way of doing business
for the center and the agency in general," said Daniel Andrews,
LCROSS project manager at Ames. "LCROSS primarily is using
commercial-off-the-shelf instruments on this mission to meet the
mission's accelerated development schedule and cost
restraints."
"This arrangement has proven to work very well," Andrews added.
"The vendors work with their products and develop a spaceflight
knowledge base, and the LCROSS project gets very mature products
for deployment on this mission."
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