That's one small step for man one for man. One giant leap for mankind. On that Unforgettable
Day July 20th 1969 Neil Armstrong became the first human to set foot on another world. Apollo 11 was
the first of six crude missions that landed on the Moon. Neil Armstrong the first of 12 men to leave
footprints in the lunar dust. But the Apollo lunar program ended in 1972 and we haven't been back
since. But now NASA is taking some small steps to return to the Moon and they're getting ready for
another giant leap. It's the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and it's next on Real World.
When astronauts first went to the Moon they never stayed for more than a few days at a
time. But plans are underway to go back for what NASA calls a sustainable long-term presence. This
time we're going to stay. But how do we get there? What supplies should we bring? Where
should we build our outposts? This mission is going to require lots of planning and that's
where the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter or LRO comes in. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has
a suite of instruments which will measure various components various aspects of the
lunar surface and in high definition and a detail that's never been measured before. Noah Petro is
a postdoctoral researcher at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. We're going to see the
Moon in a completely different way; essentially creating an atlas of the Moon that were used
by scientists and by NASA to determine what's at the surface of the Moon, the spatial extent where
things might be found also be used to find safe landing sites for future exploration and to give a
scientist an idea of how the Moon has changed and evolved over the last 4 and a half billion years.
The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter was built at Goddard. It's the size of a large SUV and will
carry six scientific instruments orbiting 50 km above the Moon, in what is called a Polar
Orbit. It will pass over both poles every time around. As the Moon rotates the spacecraft will
eventually cover the entire surface of the Moon several times. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter,
one of its missions is to look for safe landing sites and those uh areas around the poles and um
look for resources in those areas around the pole. John Keller is the Deputy project scientist for
LRO. We have six instruments on the spacecraft very high resolution uh cameras the laser which
gives us measurements of the distance from the spacecraft to the surface by what's called laser
altimetry. Laser bounces light off the surface Moon measures the amount of time the round trip
reflected light to get back. Scientists will use data from this laser altimeter call Lola to create
a high-resolution topographical map of the Moon's surface. We have a radiometer which will measure
the day and nighttime temperatures of surface. We also have on the spacecraft a UV spectrometer
which will measure essentially reflected starlight uh on the night side of the Moon
and also will give us the ability to appear into the craters of the poles which are permanently
shadowed because of the low angle of the Sun. Additionally LRO has a cosmic ray telescope
instrument to measure the radiation environment of the Moon including a brand new innovation
something called Tissue Equivalent Plastic which mimics human tissue. We going to measure how
cosmic radiation and solar energetic particles deposit their energy through this plastic.
It'll be used by the medical community to understand the interaction of radiation with
the uh biological tissue. The sixth instrument on LRO is the Lunar Exploration Neutron Detector or
LEND which will create a high-resolution map of hydrogen distribution and gather info about the
neutron component of lunar radiation. Scientists will study its data looking for evidence of water
ice near the moon surface. That's a lot of responsibility for one lunar orbiter.
Just to make sure LRO can handle all that it's going through some rigorous testing in the days
leading up to its launch.This is uh the thermal vac system so the spacecraft's in this and this
is a a very large vacuum chamber we use it to not only simulate the vacuum conditions of space
but also the thermal conditions. Because there is no atmosphere the surface temperatures will
range from 120° Centigrade down to -170 and the spacecraft sees those thermal changes. We have
heaters in there who were heating the spacecraft up fairly rapidly and then cooling it down with
the baffles of liquid nitrogen in order to to simulate that fairly rapid transition that
occurs when spacecraft goes from the night side to the day side. You know the spacecraft orbits the
Moon in under two hours, and so it sees those uh thermal transition pretty rapidly. But once it's
up it's going to return an unprecedented amount of data. The data is is dominated in terms of
quantity by a set of high-resolution cameras called the Narrow Angle Cameras. These cameras
will give us resolution on the surface of the Moon from a 50 km orbit half a meter so a pixel size
is is going to be about a half a meter. Um but it will take strips the two cameras together can take
strips of of images which are 5 km wide and 25 km of length. How many pixels is that? Well it's
uh 5,000 time 25,000 times 4, which is uh comes from having a half meter resolution. That tells
you how many pixels each individual image will be. Now we can take up to 12 images per orbit
and we get a little over 12 orbits per day and the first phase of the mission is a full year.
Wow! That's a lot of digits. So the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter is the first step in
our return to the Moon and returning humans to the Moon will help scientists and all
of us in fact address fundamental questions about the history of Earth, the solar system
and the universe and about our place among them. And in the words of Neil Armstrong,
that's a giant leap for mankind. k\Keep track of the L Mission at www.nasa.gov.
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