Source – NASA: NASA Science News for March 16, 2011
On March 19th, a full Moon of rare size and beauty will rise in the east at sunset. It’s a super “perigee moon”–the biggest in almost 20 years.
Posts Tagged ‘Moon’
Super Full Moon March 19, 2011
Thursday, March 17th, 2011NASA Successfully Launches Lunar Impactor LRO/LCROSS
Saturday, June 20th, 2009NASA Successfully Launches Lunar Impactor
NASA successfully launched the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, or LCROSS, Thursday on a mission to search for water ice in a permanently shadowed crater at the moon’s south pole.
Follow this link for a video brief on this project.
http://www.nasa.gov/mp4/219670main_ARC-LCROSS-FirstStep.mp4
Updates for June 19th
Fri, 19 Jun 2009 06:40:39 PM MDT
Flight operations team has tested payload and instruments are functional. Perfect performance!
First trajectory correction maneuver completed.
LCROSS is currently on its way to swing-by the moon. Closest approach is timed for June 23, 2009 at 6:28 AM EDT. Then LCROSS goes into a Lunar Gravity Assist Lunar Return Orbit (LGALRO) for 113 days until impacting the Lunar south pole on Oct 9, 2009 at 7:30 AM EDT. Flight team will refine impact location and time 30 days prior to impact – so check back then for the most up-to-date and refined info!
Flight operations team (at NASA Ames Research Center in California) is now in control of pointing & orientation in space (attitude).
Solar arrays are deployed and facing the Sun. Communications back to Earth are working.
Observe the LCROSS impacts!
Date & Time:
Projected lunar impact is on October 9, 2009 at 11:30 UT (7:30 a.m. EDT, 4:30 a.m. PDT), +/- 30 minutes.
The impact time will be refined as the mission progresses. Two weeks prior to impact, the impact time will be known to within a second.
