June 15, 2009. Copyright 2009, Graphic News. All rights reserved

Man’s first small step back to the Moon
By Simon Morgan

LONDON, June 15, Graphic News:  When NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) lifts off from Cape Canaveral in Florida on top of an Atlas rocket on Wednesday, June 17, mankind will be taking its first small step back to the surface of the Moon after an absence of 37 years, and 40 years almost to the month since Neil Armstrong left his footprints in the dust of the Sea of Tranquillity.
 
Apollo 11 took off from Kennedy Space Center on July 16, 1969, the lunar module Eagle touching down on the Sea of Tranquillity four days later. The mission was the astonishing fulfillment of President Kennedy’s ambition to land an American on the Moon, which he had set out in a speech to Congress barely eight years earlier.
 
In the next three years, America carried out six lunar landings, and a total of 12 men, all Americans, walked on the Moon. The intensive programme killed the crew of Apollo 1 -- Gus Grissom, Edward White and Roger Chaffee, who died in a command-module fire during a launch-pad exercise in 1967 -- and very nearly cost the lives of the crew of Apollo 13.
 
Despite the space race with the USSR that had inspired America’s giant leap -- an act of Cold War technological bravado in the face of an ascendant Communism -- no other nation followed suit and, after Apollo 17’s Challenger lander blasted off from the Moon on December 14, 1972, mankind’s brief affair with its heavenly partner appeared to be at an end.
 
Now, however, in the anniversary year of its greatest success, NASA is returning to the Moon, not to land men again just yet, but with that goal firmly in mind. The unmanned LRO, says the agency, is “the first step” in returning to the Moon, which is itself the first phase of a programme “to extend human presence in the solar system”.
 
Putting human beings back on the Moon “will allow us to test technologies, systems, flight operations, and exploration techniques to reduce the risk and enable future missions to Mars and beyond”.
 
The LRO’s mission is to map the Moon’s features in detail never seen before and so to aid the search for the perfect site for a future manned lunar outpost. The 1,000kg spacecraft will reach the Moon in about four days. After entering an initial, commissioning orbit, it will take up its final low polar orbit, about 30 miles above the surface, and spend a year using its payload of six instruments to gather vital data.
 
These include the Diviner Lunar Radiometer Experiment, which will measure temperatures on and under the surface, helping to identify any landing hazards; the Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter, which will generate a high-resolution three-dimensional map of the surface; and the Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera, which will photograph up to 10 percent of the lunar surface with a resolution down to a little over three feet.
 
Alongside the LRO on board the Atlas V rocket will be a second spacecraft, the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, or LCROSS; its task is “to seek a definitive answer about the presence of water ice at the lunar poles”.
 
Exactly when man might fly again to the Moon remains unclear; these are early days -- LRO and LCROSS are the first two missions of the new Exploration Systems Mission Directorate, tasked with advancing the goal of future human exploration of the solar system.
 
But if NASA gets its way -- and, of course, the necessary funding -- America will soon be one step closer to making good on the prediction by Eugene Cernan, the commander of Apollo 17, the final Apollo mission, and the last man to walk on the Moon: “We leave as we came,” he said on December 17, 1972,  “and God willing as we shall return, with peace and hope for all mankind.”
/ENDS