NASA Lunar Science Activities
James L. Green Planetary Science Division NASA Headquarters Washington DC 20546 [email protected]
NASA’s Planetary Science Division (PSD) program encompasses a broad range of missions to many destinations in the solar system but the Earth’s Moon holds a special place in these efforts. Our planetary science missions are either strategic or openly competed through announcements of opportunity and are led by a principal investigator (PI). In exploring any particular solar system object, NASA has followed a general paradigm of “flyby, orbit, land, rove, and return.” This prescription has been followed most completely for investigations of the Moon and Mars. The Exploration Systems Mission Directorate (ESMD) will be launching the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) in 2008 in preparation for manned missions to the Moon. LRO is a strategic mission with competed instrumentation to support exploration goals. After one year of LRO observations, ESMD will transition the spacecraft operations to the PSD for its prime science mission phase.
The two competitive PI mission lines in the Planetary Science Division are called Discovery and New Frontiers, both of which have the potential to support Lunar missions. Currently there are three Phase-A studies in competition in the Discovery program which includes the Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) mission by Maria Zuber (PI), MIT. The down-selection for Discovery will be announced later this year. GRAIL proposes to use high-quality gravity field mapping of the Moon to determine its interior structure. The New Frontiers program will next be in competition by late 2008 providing a potential opportunity for a sample return mission from the South Pole-Aitken basin.
PSD is proud of its participation on a number of missions with our foreign space agency partners. The PSD funded participation in the Chandrayaan-1 Mission is the Moon Mineralogy Mapper (MMM) instrument that was just delivered to the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) for integration onto the spacecraft. The Chandrayaan-1 mission will conduct remote sensing during its 2-year mission 100 km above the lunar surface. MMM is a state-of-the-art imaging spectrometer (Carlé Pieters PI, Brown University) at 0.4-3.0 µm wavelengths that will provide the first map of the entire lunar surface at high spatial and spectral resolution, revealing its mineralogy.
Additional resources are being made available to US scientists to perform fundamental and applied Lunar research through the LASER (Lunar Advance Science and Exploration Research) opportunity being jointly funded by PSD and ESMD. In addition, 14 new small Lunar surface instrument studies have been selected that are being designed to be deployed by astronauts.
As NASA develops its strategic plans for future Lunar missions, the PSD will continue to embrace international participation and look for opportunities to contribute as appropriate. In order to encourage multi-agency efforts in developing Lunar missions the PSD will be releasing yearly calls for Missions of Opportunities beginning in 2008. This effort will enable NASA Planetary Science funded groups to better meet international mission investigation milestones and schedules thereby fostering a better environment for international cooperation on Lunar missions.
PRINCIPAL AUTHOR’S BIO (~50 WORDS)
JAMES L. GREEN is the Director for NASA’s Planetary Science Division. He developed NASA’s first internet the Space Physics Analysis Network, has been the Head of the National Space Science Data Center, and a co-investigator on the IMAGE mission. Green has published widely on various phenomena in planetary magnetospheres.