LADEE transitioning out of commissioning phase

Dana Berry's concept of the NASA Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) in low lunar orbit [NASA/ARC].

Rick Elphic
LADEE Project Scientist

Things are going very well on LADEE.  We've spent the last few weeks, following lunar orbit insertion, splitting our efforts between the laser communication (LLCD) demonstration activities and science instrument commissioning.

The lasercomm (Lunar Laser Communications Demonstration, LLCD) activities have been highly successful, with the LADEE space terminal linking up with the ground terminal at White Sands optically in no more than a few tens of seconds, without resorting to commanding through the conventional RF uplink.  Lasercomm has demonstrated downlink rates as high as 622 megabits/sec, and uplinks of 20 megabits/sec.  This downlink rate is sufficient to convey HD video (if LADEE had HD video!).

The three science instruments have been stepping through a series of tests to characterize their performance in orbit around the Moon, and have acquired preliminary science and engineering data in our high, 250-km altitude commissioning orbit.  

The Neutral Mass Spectrometer (NMS) has performed atmospheric ram measurements as well as special operations for looking at atmospheric ions, as well as species sputtered from the lunar surface.  The Ultraviolet-Visible Spectrometer (UVS) has performed a series of calibration activities, including stellar calibrations, solar viewer calibrations, and telescope boresight calibrations.  UVS has also carried out a number of limb scans above the sunset, noon and sunrise limbs.  The Lunar Dust Experiment has been making many measurements at the 250-km altitude, to characterize the particle impact rates and background in this orbit. 

LADEE will soon be transitioning out of commissioning phase, starting with a maneuver to lower periapsis to around 50-km altitude over the sunrise terminator.  This maneuver is planned for Sunday, November 10, at  around 04:30 UT.  Following this maneuver the science instruments will begin taking data in a more science-like configuration.

After a final block of lasercomm testing, LADEE will drop apoapsis to its operational altitude of approximately 100 km over the sunset terminator on November 20, and then LADEE's science mission truly begins in earnest.

You can see more LADEE info at the official site, HERE, and via the Twitter account, HERE.

(HT: Clive Neal & Lunar-L)

Golden Spike and LPI schedule 2013 conference

Notional view of NASA's recently-abandoned Altair lunar lander, on a pad in the Moon's high northern latitudes formed from sintered regolith. Golden Spike Company announced in January Altair's designer Northrup Grumman to initiate design work on a manned lunar lander to return to the Moon by 2020.

The Golden Spike Company of Boulder, Colorado has announced an international workshop next October "to explore the kinds of landing sites, experiments, and geological traverses their astronauts should undertake on the Moon starting in 2020."

The two-day seminar will be held at the Lunar and Planetary Science Institute (LPI) in Houston, October 3-4, 2013.  

The program committee includes Alan Stern, Golden Spike CEO and President, Steve Mackwell of the Lunar and Planetary Institute, Clive Neal of Notre Dame, William McKinnon of Washington University, Amand Mahesh of Open University, Dr. Daniel Durda of the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) and James Carpenter of the European Space Agency.

“We’re excited to announce this workshop, which will seek input from lunar researchers from across the world regarding scientific priorities for Golden Spike expeditions, Stern said. "We also expect this workshop to multiply interest in our missions from science and space agencies across the globe.”

“It is great to be part of the beginning of a new age of space exploration where commercial entities step up as key enablers of manned exploration of the solar system, and it is so appropriate this first meeting will be held at the Lunar and Planetary Science Institute, with its roots in the Apollo era,” Mackwell added.

The workshop will consist of plenary and a poster sessions organized around topical themes, invited presentations, and discussion panels. Stern and Golden Spike’s board chair Gerry Griffin, former director of the Johnson Space Center in Houston, will offer a public presentation about Golden Spike, Thursday evening, October 3.

More information about this workshop, including an opportunity to provide an expression of interest in attending and potentially speaking, can be found HERE.

Related Posts:

Golden Spike taps Northrup Grumman to design manned lunar lander
(Ben Evans, AmericaSpace, January 13, 2013)

Turning science fiction to science fact (Jeff Foust, The Space Review, December 11, 2012)

Golden Spike Company plans commercial exploration of the Moon (December 6, 2012)

Pioneer - David S. McKay, 76

Accolades continue to pour in following the loss
of renowned planetary scientist David S. McKay.
For the following, a hat tip to Clive Neal of
Notre Dame University.

Leonard David
SPACE.com

David S. McKay, a pioneering NASA scientist in moon and Mars research, astrobiology and space resource utilization, has died, leaving a legacy of work that will continue to shape the future of space exploration. He was 76.

McKay, who served as chief scientist for astrobiology at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston,died peacefully in his sleep on Feb. 20 after battling serious health issues for several years.

As a graduate student, McKay was in the audience at Rice University in September 1962 when President John F. Kennedy gave his legendary "We choose to go to the moon" speech that put America solidly on a lunar trajectory.

McKay joined NASA in June of 1965 and was a key lunar scientist of the Apollo era, participating extensively in astronaut training leading up to 1969's historic Apollo 11 mission with field trips to Hawaii, Alaska, Iceland, Mexico and many sites in the western U.S. He also was instrumental in the geology training of Apollo 11 moonwalkers Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin.

The media spotlight shone more brightly on McKay after the Apollo era, primarily because of his work on the "Allan Hills" Mars meteorite, also known as ALH84001.

McKay was lead author of a 1996 paper in the journal Science that suggested ALH84001 may contain evidence of past life on Mars. The claim still spurs controversy, but it also sparked a shift in perspectives that is alive and well within NASA today.

"Whether one accepts their arguments or not, it has led, directly or indirectly, to investigations seeking and finding signs of life in the most extreme environments. History will judge the value of that rather serendipitous outcome, but it seems clear that its significance is, and will remain, great," said David Draper, manager of the Astromaterials Research Office at Johnson Space Center.

Read the full article, HERE.

Water found in the Apollo 15 'Genesis Rock'

Called the "Genesis Rock," Apollo 15 sample of unbrecciated anorthosite was thought to be a piece of the moon's primordial crust. In a paper published online February 17 in Nature Geoscience a University of Michigan researcher and colleagues report traces of water have been found in the sample [NASA/Johnson Space Center].

Jim Erickson

University of Michigan News Service

Traces of water have been detected within the crystalline structure of mineral samples from the lunar highland upper crust obtained during the Apollo missions, according to a University of Michigan researcher and his colleagues.

The lunar highlands are thought to represent the original crust, crystallized from a magma ocean on a mostly molten early Moon. The new findings indicate the early Moon was wet and that water there was not substantially lost during the Moon's formation.

The results seem to contradict the predominant lunar formation theory -- that the Moon was formed from debris generated during a giant impact between Earth and another planetary body, approximately the size of Mars, according to U-M's Youxue Zhang and his colleagues.

"Because these are some of the oldest rocks from the Moon, the water is inferred to have been in the Moon when it formed," Zhang said. "That is somewhat difficult to explain with the current popular Moon-formation model, in which the Moon formed by collecting the hot ejecta as the result of a super-giant impact of a Martian-size body with the proto-Earth.

"Under that model, the hot ejecta should have been degassed almost completely, eliminating all water," Zhang said.

A paper titled "Water in lunar anorthosites and evidence for a wet early Moon" was published online February 17 in the journal Nature Geoscience. The first author is Hejiu Hui, postdoctoral research associate of civil & environmental engineering & Earth sciences at the University of Notre Dame. Hui received his doctorate at U-M under Zhang, a professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences and one of three co-authors of the Nature Geoscience paper.

The Genesis Rock presented itself in situ on top of a pedestal, "as though it had been waiting for someone to retrieve it." Apollo 15 Dave Scott and Jim Irwin, aware on sight of the sample's potential value, were careful to photograph the find both before and after retrieval. AS15-86-11670 [NASA/ALSJ].

Over the last five years, spacecraft observations and new lab measurements of Apollo lunar samples have overturned the long-held belief that the Moon is bone-dry. In 2008, laboratory measurement of Apollo lunar samples by ion microprobe detected indigenous hydrogen, inferred to be the water-related chemical species hydroxyl, in lunar volcanic glasses. In 2009, NASA's Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing satellite, known as LCROSS, slammed into a permanently shadowed lunar crater and ejected a plume of material that was surprisingly rich in water ice.

Hydroxyls have also been detected in other volcanic rocks and in the lunar regolith, the layer of fine powder and rock fragments that coats the lunar surface. Hydroxyls, which consist of one atom of hydrogen and one of oxygen, were also detected in the lunar anorthosite study reported in Nature Geoscience.

In the latest work, Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy was used to analyze the water content in grains of plagioclase feldspar from lunar anorthosites, highland rocks composed of more than 90 percent plagioclase. The bright-colored highlands rocks are thought to have formed early in the Moon's history when plagioclase crystallized from a magma ocean and floated to the surface.

The infrared spectroscopy work, which was conducted at Zhang's U-M lab and co-author Anne H. Peslier's lab, detected about 6 parts per million of water in the lunar anorthosites.

"The surprise discovery of this work is that in lunar rocks, even in nominally water-free minerals such as plagioclase feldspar, the water content can be detected," said Zhang, James R. O'Neil Collegiate Professor of Geological Sciences.

"It's not 'liquid' water that was measured during these studies but hydroxyl groups distributed within the mineral grain," said Notre Dame's Hui. "We are able to detect those hydroxyl groups in the crystalline structure of the Apollo samples."

The hydroxyl groups the team detected are evidence that the lunar interior contained significant water during the Moon's early molten state, before the crust solidified, and may have played a key role in the development of lunar basalts. "The presence of water," said Hui, "could imply a more prolonged solidification of the lunar magma ocean than the once-popular anhydrous Moon scenario suggests."

The researchers analyzed grains from ferroan anorthosites 15415 and 60015, as well as troctolite 76535. Ferroan anorthosite 15415 is one the best known rocks of the Apollo collection and is popularly called the Genesis Rock because the astronauts thought they had a piece of the Moon's primordial crust. It was collected on the rim of Spur Crater (Science Station 7) during the Apollo 15 mission.

Rock 60015 is highly shocked ferroan anorthosite collected near the lunar module during the Apollo 16 mission. Troctolite 76535 is a coarse-grained plutonic rock collected during the Apollo 17 mission.

Co-author Peslier is at Jacobs Technology and NASA Johnson Space Center. Fourth author of the Nature Geoscience paper, Clive R. Neal, is a professor of civil and environmental engineering and earth sciences at the University of Notre Dame.

Second Conference on the Lunar Highlands

First Results: from Figure 2, "Preliminary results on the structure of lunar highland crust from GRAIL and LOLA altimetry," Zuber & Smith, et al, (#9015, Second Conference on the Lunar Highlands Crust, 2012) Preliminary GRAIL gravity field for the 86-km-diameter Tycho crater. Tycho is the prominent structure at upper left. In this GRAIL map reds correspond to mass excesses and blues to mass deficits. GRAIL gravity has a spatial resolution of 18 kilometers [NASA/JPL/MIT].

Clive Neal
Notre Dame

The first conference on the Lunar Highlands Crust was held in 1979. Since that seminal meeting, our knowledge of the lunar highlands has advanced enormously. Unimagined new data have become available, notably in orbital remote sensing of mineralogy, chemistry, topography, and gravity; geochronology; and geochemistry, especially isotopic constraints and the abundances and natures of lunar volatiles. These new data are paralleled by new concepts of solar system science, including the importance and timing of impact events (including the one that formed the Moon) and the nature of the early solar system disk and its dynamical instabilities. 

In light of these advances in the last 34 years, the time seems right for a synoptic reexamination of the lunar highlands crust. The Second Conference on the Lunar Highlands Crust is intended to bring members of the planetary science community together to share their specialized insights into the lunar highlands crust, exchange ideas freely, and perhaps develop new cross-disciplinary ideas and tests of those ideas.

A field trip to the Stillwater Mine will be held on Thursday, July 12, and a field trip to Picket Pin Mountain will be held on Monday, July 16 (departing Bozemanon Sunday, July 15, following the conclusion of the final oral session). More details about the field trips, along with information about registration, accommodations, transportation, and much more, are available in the final announcement.

For more information, visit the conference website, HERE.

"Preliminary results on the structure of lunar highland crust from GRAIL and LOLA altimetry," Zuber & Smith, et al, (#9015, Second Conference on the Lunar Highlands Crust, 2012)

Related: Lunar Picture of the Day (LPOD), "First Results," June 13, 2012, Charles Wood

Research scientist openings at JPL

Clive R. Neal

LUNAR-L
University of Notre Dame

The Planetary Science Section at JPL, based in Pasadena, CA, is looking to fill two positions for researchers in areas relevant to future Martian sample return missions. The first position is for study in the area of mineralogy, petrology and/or meteoritics. The research is expected to further knowledge of petrogenetic processes throughout the Solar System. Advanced scientific knowledge of petrology, mineralogy, and/or meteoritics is expected. The ability to use analytical and theoretical approaches to solving problems related to the origin and evolution of igneous rocks and/or extraterrestrial samples is essential.

The second position is for a researcher within the area of organic geochemistry with a strong focus on geobiological and/or astrobiological investigations. The researcher will possess expertise in those areas related to the origin and significance of organic material in terrestrial and extraterrestrial geological samples. Themes of study are expected to include the origin and evolution of life on Earth, the study of extraterrestrial organic compounds, and/or the recognition of biosignatures in returned Solar System samples.

It is expected that both positions will pursue new mission and/or instrument opportunities through advocacy and outreach within the scientific and stakeholder community. This pursuit will involve working closely with science and engineering teams at JPL to design Solar System sample return and planetary exploration missions and instrumentation. The candidates are expected to have a PhD along with advanced knowledge and demonstrated experience in conceiving, defining, and conducting independent scientific research. Both positions include significant start up packages. Both positions offer a competitive salary and impressive benefits with a renowned leader in Planetary Science.

To view the full job descriptions and apply to these positions, please visit: http://careerlaunch.jpl.nasa.gov, (see Requisitions #10654 and #10655). Applications will be reviewed as they are received, and should include a curriculum vitae, a career statement with research objectives and contact information for three professional references. JPL/Caltech is an equal opportunity/affirmative action employer.

NASA Lunar Science Forum IV

FIRST ANNOUNCEMENT:

Clive R. Neal
University of Notre Dame

The NASA Lunar Science Institute is pleased to announce the 4th annual NASA Lunar Science Forum, to be held July 19-21, 2011.

This year's forum will feature sessions on recent scientific results from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) and Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS), dedicated side-conferences for graduate students and young lunar professionals, as well as the annual recognition of scientific accomplishments and associated keynote lecture.

As in past years, science sessions are structured to report on both recent results and future opportunities for lunar science, exploration, education and outreach.

We also look forward to news on the upcoming lunar missions GRAIL and LADEE and welcome abstracts across the many fields of lunar science.

Abstracts will be accepted starting February 21 through May 2, 2011 at http://lunarscience.nasa.gov/lsf2011

February's announcement will discuss the Lunar Science Forum logistics, but please save the date now as you make your summer meeting plans.

We look forward to another exciting meeting focusing on science Of, On and From the Moon!

Note: The 4th Annual NLSI Conference will be held once again this year at the NLSI's host facility, NASA's Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, California.

NASA NEO Workshop & Downloads

Presentations from the NASA Exploration of Near-Earth Objects Objectives workshop, August 10-11, are now available online, HERE.

Though video of presenters selected from previous such events are also available, HERE, these are not yet posted for the NEO workshop.

Dr. Clive Neal, chair of the Lunar Exploration and Analysis Group (LEAG), presented Using the Moon to Facilitate exploration of Near Earth Objects, available (pdf) HERE.

Heads Up: Southside Amateur Radio Club

2009 Annual Meeting of the Lunar Exploration Analysis Group: An Official Report

Clive R. Neal
Notre Dame

The annual meeting of the Lunar Exploration Analysis Group (LEAG) was held at the Lunar & Planetary Institute in Houston, Texas, over 3.5 days (November 16-19, 2009. The meeting brought together NASA officials, lunar scientists and engineers, and established commercial space companies and lunar entrepreneurial firms. The focus of the meeting was to discuss how to make the next phase of solar system exploration (robotic leading to human) sustainable and, to this end, included the first exciting results from the NASA LCROSS and LRO missions. In the broadest sense, space exploration encompasses:

– Learning to live and work successfully and productively off world.
– Expanding Earth’s economic sphere beyond Earth orbit.
– Strengthening existing and create new global partnerships.
– Engaging, inspiring, and educating the public.
Making it sustainable is one of the three themes in the draft Lunar Exploration Roadmap, developed by LEAG (http://www.lpi.usra.edu/leag/ler_draft.shtml), for the Science Committee of the NASA Advisory Council, which address why we are returning to the Moon through three themes:

– Pursue scientific activity to address fundamental questions about the solar. system, the universe and our place in them.
– Use the moon to prepare for future missions to Mars and other destinations.
– Extend sustained human presence on the moon to enable eventual settlement.
To be sustainable, lunar activity must consistently return value greater than the investment required to create that value. International and commercial partnerships are vitally important in achieving this result. The following high-level conclusions from the LEAG meeting will be incorporated into the next version of the Lunar Exploration Roadmap:

• A sustainable lunar enterprise requires the use of lunar resources to “live off the land.”
• A sustainable lunar enterprise begins with robotic missions as incremental steps to facilitate more productive human missions.
• A sustainable lunar enterprise provides a basis for long-term human presence on the Moon, enabling exploration of the solar system and a space-based economy.

Impressive results from NASA’s LCROSS-LRO, Japan’s Kaguya, and India’s Chandrayaan-1 indicate the presence of important lunar resources that are vital for sustainable human presence, and which could significantly reduce the cost of human space exploration. Furthermore, the scientific importance of the Moon is now clearer than ever, given strong evidence of its value for studying the solar system volatile flux history.
For more information, please contact the LEAG Chair, Clive R. Neal (neal.1@nd.edu).

Lunar Dust, Plasma and Atmosphere: The Next Steps (NLSI Workshop)

One grain of lunar dust, micro-photographed on Maui by inventor and scientist Gary Greenberg, under the supervision of NASA contractors Carol and Christopher Kiely, shows the optically maturity and nanophase iron typical of the dusty lunar surface, abrasive even when microscopic, and subject to charging, levitation and fall out; a problem for man and machine about which NASA is making slow progress. [The Maui News, 24 May 2009].

Clive R. Neal, Dept. of Civil Engineering and Geological Sciences at Notre Dame, announced today that a science workshop, "Lunar Dust, Plasma and Atmosphere: The Next Steps," will be held January 27–29, 2010 at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, of the University of Colorado at Boulder.

See: http://lpa2010.colorado.edu/

The meeting is being organized by the Colorado Center for Lunar Dust and Atmospheric Studies (CCLDAS), a National Lunar Science Institute (NLSI) center. [http://lasp.colorado.edu/ccldas/]

Tandem radar searches for lunar ice

Link to S-Bank frequency scan of the Moon's South Pole

HAT TIP to Dr. Clive Neal

With the Mini-RF instrument, a synthetic aperture radar flying aboard NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, or LRO, the space agency now has two powerful tools searching for ice on the moon.

This week operators powered up and began preparing Mini-RF (Miniature Radio Frequency) for its primary mission, to create detailed images of the moon’s darkest areas, scan the lunar surface for hints of water ice and demonstrate new communications technologies.

LRO, launched June 18 from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Fla., and reached the moon June 25. Its seven science instruments now are being checked out and brought online.

The LRO Mini-RF is a version of the radar already circling the moon on the Indian Space Research Organization’s Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft. Since Chandrayaan-1 orbital operations began in late 2008, its Mini-RF, also known as Mini-SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar), has mapped about 80 percent of both of the moon’s poles and provided images of areas never seen from Earth. Its second imaging period is set to begin in mid-August, opening the possibility of unique, joint measurements between Chandrayaan-1 and LRO that would enhance the hunt for ice.

“The Mini-RF team has reached a significant milestone, two payloads now in operation at the moon, “says Jason Crusan, program executive for the Mini-RF program, from NASA’s Space Operations Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. “Having two very complementary instruments orbiting the moon on two different spacecraft shows how truly international the exploration of the moon can be.”

Mini-RF sends radio pulses to the moon from the orbiting spacecraft and then precisely records the radio echoes that bounce back from the surface, along with their timing and frequency. From these data scientists can build images of the moon that not only show the terrain in areas they otherwise couldn’t see, such as the permanently-shadowed areas near the lunar poles, but also contain information on the physical nature of the terrain.

“We’re uncovering the moon’s coldest, darkest regions, looking into craters and at other mysterious areas that never receive sunlight, yet preserve materials from the solar system’s earliest days,” says Ben Bussey, Mini-RF deputy principal investigator from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Md. “The exploration potential of these regions is also significant, since any ice deposits we locate would be valuable to future human lunar explorers.”

The Mini-RF instruments were designed, built and tested by a team from across the United States. APL hosts the operations center and performed the final integration and testing on both instruments. They were developed and built by the Naval Air Warfare Center and several other commercial and government contributors, including Sandia National Laboratories, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman and BAE Systems. Instrument principal investigators Stewart Nozette (LRO) and Paul Spudis (Chandrayaan-1) are from the Universities Space Research Association’s Lunar and Planetary Institute. NASA’s Space Operations Mission Directorate, NASA Headquarters, manages the Mini-RF program.

Not just another, high-res radar map

In the center of just one 6300 x 6300 bistatic radar image, from a mosaic created by reflection of 12.3 cm wavelength radar sent from the fixed Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico and then received at Greenbank in West Virginia, Shackleton crater, the lunar South Pole on its rim and a portion of the crater's interior in unveiled in rich detail. Courtesy: Cornell University/Smithsonian Institution.

It has to be seen to be believed. At least one of several sections in the mosaic should be seen, anyway.

Notre Dame geologist Clive Neal announced the availability of new, highly detailed resolution radar unveiling the Moon's south pole region in sharp clarity. In index image for the large plats can be viewed and downloaded in 110 mb sections on the web from HERE.

Chuck Wood at Lunar Picture of the Day (LPOD) has reduced the work, featured as his essential daily offering for July 4, by a factor of ten, available HERE.

"A high-resolution S-band (12.6 cm wavelength) radar view of the lunar south pole, obtained using the NAIC Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico and the NRAO Green Bank Telescope (GBT) in West Virginia, is now available for download," Neal writes.

"These data were acquired in 2005 and have a single-look spatial resolution of 20 m per pixel. a circularly polarized signal was transmitted from Arecibo, and the echo was received at the GBT, in both the opposite sense (OC) of circular polarization, that is to say, the one expected for a mirror like reflection, and the same sense (SC) to that transmitted."

"The image available for download is the SC (same sense circular) polarization channel."

The data are "focused," similar to synthetic aperture radar images, allowing for very fine spatial resolution over a large area."

"The radar echoes are mapped to power values proportional to the backscatter coefficient, scaled to a 60-dB dynamic range about an approximate mean power value for the entire map, and further scaled to an 8-bit range. Each DN value thus represents a power change of about 0.23 dB. A correction for the antenna beam pattern on the lunar surface is applied, but we do not correct for the dependence of backscatter strength on incidence angle or scattering area. The high dynamic range of the observations will reveal even modest folding of bright reflections across the Doppler axis of each run, and these appear as dim ghost crater walls in some shadowed areas. There is also a higher background noise level along the center of each focused image, which can be seen as a brighter stripe in each of the 3 mosaicked images, especially near the limb."

"Three separate images were obtained across the south polar region and were mosaicked to produce the 60,000 by 60,000 pixel image. The separate images have slightly different noise levels in the shadowed terrain and there are some small imperfections in the mosaicking. For download purposes, this image has been separated into 25 contiguous quadrangles, each of which is 12,000 by 12,000 pixels (about 150 Mbytes) in size. The image is in a polar stereographic projection with a resolution of 20 meters per pixel. The south pole location, as indicated by the ephemeris information used in the observations, is at the center of mosaic quadrangle "R" (or at row=42,000, col=30,000 in the fully assembled map)."

Requests for additional information may be directed to Bruce Campbell (Smithsonian Institution; campbellb@si.edu) or Don Campbell (Cornell University; campbell@astro.cornell.edu).

The complete dual-channel dataset is being prepared for submission to the Planetary Data Sysyem. This work was supported in part by a grant from NASA's Planetary Astronomy Program. We thank Lynn Carter and Kassie Wells for help with data acquisition and analysis and the staff at the Arecibo and Green Bank Observatories for invaluable assistance in collecting the lunar radar data. The Arecibo Observatory is part of the National Astronomy and Ionosphere Center (NAIC), which is operated by Cornell University under a cooperative agreement with the National Science Foundation (NSF). The Green Bank Telescope is part of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), a facility of the NSF operated under cooperative agreement by Associated Universities, Inc.

NASA TO brief on lunar exploration plans

WASHINGTON -- NASA is inviting interested industry representatives, academics and reporters to learn more about the Ares V heavy lift-launch vehicle, the Altair lunar lander, and the roles they will play in returning humans to the moon by 2020.

The Exploration Systems Mission Directorate forum will take place Thursday, Sept. 25, from 8:30 to 11:30 a.m. EDT, at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, 1615 H Street NW, Washington.

The forum will focus on the first phase conceptual designs for the Ares V heavy lift-launch vehicle, the Altair lunar lander and lunar exploration scenarios. Forum attendees will discuss the outcomes of a nine-month lunar transportation capabilities study and near-term business opportunities.

Participants from NASA's Exploration Systems Mission Directorate include Doug Cooke, deputy associate administrator for the directorate, Geoff Yoder, director of the Directorate Integration Office, and Jeff Hanley, manager of NASA's Constellation Program.

Representatives of industry and academia interested in attending the forum must register online. Attendance is limited and registration will close at 5 p.m. EDT, Sept. 23. Registration and additional information, including an agenda, are available at:

http://www.nasa.gov/directorates/esmd/home/lunar_id.html

Reporters planning to attend must contact Stephanie Schierholz at 202-358-4997 or Grey Hautaluoma at 202-358-0688 by 5 p.m., Sept. 24.

The Ares V rocket and Altair lunar lander are part of a fleet of vehicles that NASA's Constellation Program is developing for a new space transportation system designed to travel beyond low Earth orbit. The Constellation fleet also includes the Orion crew exploration vehicle and the Ares I launch vehicle. NASA plans to establish a human outpost on the moon through a successive series of lunar missions beginning in 2020.

For more information about NASA's Constellation Program, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/constellation

-------------------- Hat tip to
Dr. Clive R. Neal
Department of Civil Engineering & Geological Sciences
156 Fitzpatrick Hall
University of Notre Dame
Notre Dame, IN 46556, USA

Tel. 574-631-8328
Fax. 574-631-9236

http://www.nd.edu/~cneal