Today at Brown

Blast off! The LRO/LRCOSS mission to the moon began Thursday evening. NASA began today to prepare the way for the U.S. space program’s eventual return to the moon with the lift-off at 5:32 pm this evening of an Atlas V rocket carrying the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) and Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS). A team of Brown professors and graduate students was on hand for the launch, including Assistant Professor of Geological Sciences Michael Wyatt, a participating scientist on the LRO mission.

Michael Wyatt “The primary goals of the mission are to find safe landing sites for future human exploration, locate potential resources like water ice, and characterize the radiation environment,” says Wyatt. He has been blogging about the mission from Cape Canaveral for Astronomy magazine.

Members of the Brown’s geological sciences department are involved in several of the LRO science experiments. Professor James Head ’70 Ph.D. is a co-investigator on the Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter (LOLA), which will provide a precise global topographic model of the moon. Professor Peter Shultz is a co-investigator on LCROSS, which will crash-land on the moon to sample potential water-ice deposits near the lunar pole.

“I am a participating scientist on the Diviner experiment,” Wyatt adds. “We will create detailed global maps of lunar surface temperatures to assess the stability of ice deposits, to map variations in surface compositions, and to infer exploration hazards such as roughness and rock abundance.

The LRO spacecraft Credit: NASA / Debbie McCallum “There are also many graduate and undergraduate students working on LRO. Attending today’s launch with me at Cape Canaveral Florida are graduate students Kerri Donaldson Hanna (Diviner), Debra Hurwitz (LOLA), Brendan Hermalyn (LCROSS), and Angela Stickle (LCROSS).

“So, as you can see, there is a lot of Brown involvement with LRO as NASA takes the first steps back to the moon.”