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So Globy, I got another brain bender for you. How many people have actually walked on the Moon? Huh
Give up? The answer is 12.
But it's been a long time since the last person walked on the Moon.
NASA hasn't visited the moon since 1972. That's over 35 years.
NASA has decided we should go back to the Moon and explore it again. NASA is building a new spacecraft called the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter or LRO for short.
That could help make going back to the Moon easier. The LRO is currently being tested at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.
The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has a suite of instruments which will measure various components various aspects of the
lunar surface in high definition and a detail that's never been measured before, essentially creating an atlas of
the Moon that would be used by scientists and by NASA to determine what's at the surface of the Moon,
where things might be found, also to be used to find safe landing sites for future exploration,
and to give scientist an idea of how the Moon has changed and evolved over the last 4 and a half billion years.
The original NASA missions to the Moon were with the Apollo spacecraft. The New
Missions will be with the Orion craft. They'll be similar in design to the ones that originally went
to the Moon but they will be larger and the plan is to stay on the Moon for longer periods of time.
The LRO will be attached to a rock and launched in the near future. It will take the LRO four days to
get from Earth to the Moon. Once the LRO arrives it will spend at least one year orbiting the Moon and
gathering information for engineers and scientists back here on Earth. It will be in a low orbit, only
about 48 km from the surface of the Moon. That's only about 30 miles above the ground. One of the first
things the LRO will look for as it orbits the Moon is a safe landing site for the astronauts
when they eventually make it back to the Moon. After all we don't want them to to land in a giant
crater or a place that's too rocky. A lot of people think of the Moon as being like a a billiard ball
being very smooth and and on some level the Moon is is smoother than some places on the Earth. But
in other other aspects you know craters all over the surface of the Moon provides for a very rocky
and rough terrain very difficult potentially to explore. So we need to find places where it would
be safe to send humans in the future. But it's not just about how smooth the surface is that
determines if it's a good place to land. Scientists also have to think about the surface temperatures.
On the Moon the polar regions actually receive more sunlight every day than other parts of the
Moon so the temperature stays pretty much the same all the time. Other parts of the Moon never
see the Sun they are always in a shadow and are very cold. The LRO has instruments on board that
will allow scientists to make a temperature map of the Moon. So this large chamber behind us here is
it's called the Thermal Vac Chamber -Thermal Vacuum Chamber so that we can put a spacecraft inside of
it and right now LRO is inside of this chamber and essentially mimic the thermal environment
that the spacecraft will experience at the Moon. But also the vacuum environment so that we can
test to make sure that the spacecraft Will Survive the extremes in temperature the hots and the colds
that it'll encounter as it's orbiting the Moon. We uh have heaters in there we surrounded surrounded
with these heaters. We were heating heating the spacecraft up fairly rapidly and then cooling it
down with baffles of liquid nitrogen surrounding it in order to simulate that fairly rapid
transition that occurs when the spacecraft goes from the night side to the day side. You know the
spacecraft orbits the Moon in uh uh under 2 hours and so uh it it sees those uh thermal transitions
pretty rapidly. NASA plans to build an outpost on the Moon. Our astronauts will spend a long time
living in the outpost so they'll need to use the local resources to survive. The polar regions on
the Moon may contain water ice. This would be an important resource for the astronauts who
are living there. The LRO will give sign scientists clues to finding natural resources including water
for the astronauts to use. Engineers and scientists need to test new technologies for the return to
the Moon. The LRO mission will give them a chance to try out new instruments that may even benefit
us here on Earth. One of the things that we want to do uh is use the more advanced technology that
we have today to uh give us uh uh superior maps and knowledge of where these hazards are so that
they can be avoided.
Wow Globy! The LRO sounds like a really fascinating spacecraft and the information
it gathers will be an incredible help to the next generation of astronauts to walk on the Moon.
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