Chris Lintott’s Universe

The main point of our visit to the Goddard Space Centre a day or two ago was to catch up with the team behind the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which is now less than a year from launch. Obviously we were following some more prestigious British visitors, but they were extremely nice to us anyway. It’s a shock to realise that the Apollo era data just isn’t good enough to plan for a manned return to the Moon, and so LRO’s task is to create the ultimate lunar map from an orbit just 50km above the lunar surface. The impact of these pictures should be spectacular; they’ll show such fine detail that we should be able to see the tracks left by the lunar rovers the Apollo astronauts used. The spacecraft parts are being assembled at Goddard now, and we were allowed to get up close and personal with the spacecraft bus (the chassis, essentially). I’m now paranoid my jinx will strike, but they do seem to know what they’re doing. I promised I’d plug their website, which is here.

We do try to appear sophisticated, but really, when it comes down to it, any mission which involves hitting something is going to do well in the PR stakes. It was fantastic to spend the day in the company of the LCROSS team. LCROSS is the sister spacecraft to the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, and is due to crash an impactor the size of a large bus (and we did find a bus to film for comparison purposes) into the lunar South Pole just three months after launch, which should be in October. The time from being selected to launch is 30 months, which must be some sort of record, but everything seems to be going well. The stated goal is to provide the definitive yes or no as to whether there is water ice in substantial quantities in the region; very controversial evidence from previous missions and from radar has suggested there might be (and I, personally, wouldn’t put it any more strongly than that) and if there is then the South Pole becomes the absolutely default choice for future manned bases. Not because you’d need to drink it, but because it provides hydrogen and oxygen for rocket fuel. Anyway, regardless of whether the water is there or not, this is a way of digging beneath the surface of the Moon in a landscape very different from those which Apollo sampled. Even better, the flash LCROSS produces will be magnitude 6 (best guess), bright enough to be seen in binoculars and thus visible to almost anyone. I would suspect that the impact, in January 2009, will have more people looking at our nearest neighbour simultaneously than at any time since Apollo. In the meantime, you’ll only have to wait until March to see the wonderful interviews we filmed today, along with the bus.

I’ve just landed in California as part of a fairly epic Sky at Night trip around the US, conducting interviews for a couple of programmes about the new era of lunar exploration. I am slightly worried that we should really be in China or Japan, though, as both countries have successful new probes in orbit around the Moon right now. One of the things that surprises me – particularly when you talk to astronauts who were lucky enough to actually go there – is that the more we explore the Moon, our companion in space, the more we end up looking back home. That was true in the Apollo era, and it’s true with these amazing shots from the Kaguya probe.

Hat tip : Bad Astronomy.

Update : Better Bad Astronomy post.