21st Century Complete Guide to the NASA Lunar Prospector Mission to the Moon (CD-ROM)

World Spaceflight News

ISBN 10: 1422005135 ISBN 13: 9781422005132

Verlag: Progressive Management, 2006

Inhaltsangabe

This electronic book on CD-ROM provides comprehensive coverage of the NASA Lunar Prospector mission to the moon. At 9:28 p.m. (EST) on January 6, 1998, Lunar Prospector (LP) blasted off to the Moon aboard a Lockheed Martin solid-fuel, three-stage rocket called Athena II. It was successfully on its way to the Moon for an 18-month, polar orbit mission dedicated to globally mapping lunar resources, gravity, and magnetic fields, and even outgassing events. About 13 minutes after launch, the Athena II placed the Lunar Prospector payload into a "parking orbit" 115 miles above the Earth. Following a 42-minute coast in the parking orbit, Prospector’s Trans Lunar Injection (TLI) stage successfully completed a 64-second burn, releasing the spacecraft from Earth orbit and setting it on course to the Moon, a 105-hour coast. The official mission timeline began when the spacecraft switched on 56 minutes, 30 seconds after liftoff. Shortly after turning the vehicle on, mission controllers deployed the spacecraft’s three extendible masts, or booms. Finally, the spacecraft’s five instruments -- the gamma-ray spectrometer, alpha particle spectrometer, neutron spectrometer, magnetometer and electron reflectometer -- were turned on. On Sunday, January 11, at 7:20 a.m. (EST), Lunar Prospector was successfully captured into lunar orbit, and a few days later began its mission to globally map the Moon. Lunar Prospector was a small, 1.3 meter in diameter by 1.4 meter tall bus with three 2.5 meter science masts carrying its five science instruments and isolating them from the spacecraft's electronics, spin-stabilized spacecraft in a polar orbit with a period of 118 minutes at a nominal altitude of 100 km (63 miles). Since the Moon rotated a full turn beneath the spacecraft every lunar cycle (~27.3 days) as it zipped around the Moon every 2 hours, Prospector visited a polar region every hour and completely covered the lunar surface twice a month. On July 31, 1999, NASA's Lunar Prospector spacecraft dived into a permanently shadowed crater near the Moon's south pole. Scientists hoped that the crash might liberate up to 40 lb of water vapor along with a plume of dusty impact debris, proving once and for all that water exists on the moon. Hundreds of amateur and professional astronomers watched for signs of the impact using everything from home-built telescopes to the world's most powerful observatories. The chances of seeing a cloud of dust kicked up by the crash were slim and, true to expectations, no one saw or photographed clear evidence of a dust plume. Whether or not water is eventually found on the moon, scientists agree that the July 31, 1999 impact into the southern polar region was a fittingly creative finish to a low-cost Discovery Program mission that exceeded all expectations after more than 6,800 lunar orbits in 18 months. Lunar Prospector's data gathering resulted in a series of discoveries and new scientific tools, including: tentative evidence that water ice exists in shadowed craters near the moon's south and north poles, the first precise gravity map of the entire lunar surface, confirmation of the presence of local magnetic fields that create the two smallest magnetospheres in the Solar System, and the first global maps of the moon's elemental composition. As a bonus, in addition to the Lunar Prospector mission coverage on the CD-ROM, there is extensive coverage of two other NASA missions: the Stardust comet sample return mission, and the New Horizons mission to Pluto. The CD-ROM is packed with over 30,000 pages reproduced using Adobe Acrobat PDF software - allowing direct viewing on Windows and Macintosh systems. Advanced search and indexing features are built into our reproduction, providing a complete full-text index. This enables the user to search all the files on the disk at one time for words or phrases using just one search command! The Acrobat cataloging technology adds enormous value and uncommon functionality t

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Progressive Management
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2006
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1422005135
• ISBN 13: 9781422005132
• Einband: CD-ROM
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar