- WASHINGTON (Reuters) - It may not have taken the giant step for mankind
that Apollo astronauts did when they landed on the moon, but NASA's Lunar
Prospector has gathered a wealth of data since it began circling the moon
in January. Highlights from the information Prospector collected during
its first few months in orbit, including new evidence showing the presence
of water on the moon, were published Thursday in the journal Science. Prospector
reported back the presence of hydrogen, which is often bundled into water
molecules, on both the north and south poles of the moon, according to
William Feldman, a laboratory fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory,
who led the study on Prospector's search for water on the moon. Prospector
found a total of approximately 3 billion metric tons of water ice on each
pole of the moon, Feldman said. The water ice, which was probably brought
to the moon on the tails of comets or asteroids, is buried between 1.5
feet ) and six feet under the surface of the moon. This finding differs
from data received from the spacecraft Clementine, which indicated the
possible presence of water on the moon. Clementine's findings, published
in Science in November 1996, showed less water. The presence of water on
the moon is important if the moon is ever going to be colonized or used
as a stopping-off point in exploring planets, Feldman said. ``It would
be less expensive by far if we could live off the resources that are found
on the moon,'' he said in a telephone interview. Feldman will get a chance
to further check these findings when Prospector dips from its current altitude
of 63 miles to an orbit of just six miles above the moon in January. The
Lunar Prospector spacecraft is a cylinder, about five feet in diameter
and four feet tall and weighs about 650 pounds. Its engines need to be
fired only once every 56 days to correct its orbit. Prospector has no onboard
computer, only an electronics box that executes commands it receives from
a team on Earth. ``It's a very stupid spacecraft which is great because
nothing ever goes wrong,'' said Alan Binder, director of the Lunar Research
Institute and designer of the Lunar Prospector Mission. The spacecraft's
simplicity also has benefits for the research, since it produces little
background noise to interfere with the scientific experiments, Binder said.
Prospector is mapping the entire moon, determining the concentrations of
elements that make up the moon. The Apollo missions only mapped about 25
percent of the moon, in the areas around the moon's equator. Prospector
houses five separate scientific instruments which, in addition to the mapping
and the search for water, have been relaying information about the moon's
gravity and its magnetic field, which may have been caused by the impact
of comets, Binder said. Prospector is traveling at a speed of 3,669 miles
per hour . It circles the moon about once every two hours. ``The real highlight
of Lunar Prospector is the quality of the data we're getting for the low
cost,'' Binder said in a telephone interview. The mission, which cost $63
million, is part of NASA's Discovery Program, which funds space missions
planned by an independent group to keep down space exploration costs, capped
at $150 million for Discovery missions. Previously, NASA would plan the
mission and solicit bids from independent groups to work on individual
components of the project, resulting in higher costs and taking more time
to complete.
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