NASA plans probe mission to moon in 2008

Washington, Apr 11 (UNI) The U S space agency says that it plans for a 73 million dollar moon mission that will be visible from earth.

NASA today said that the mission, to be built by Northrop Grumman Corp and scheduled for 2008, will be great enough to send up a plume of material, some of which could well be ice made from water.

''We're going to learn a lot from this,'' said program manager Dan Andrews of NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California. ''It's going to give us a real definitive understanding of what we have up there.'' A monitoring satellite that is part of LCROSS, but separate from the reconnaissance orbiter, will then fly through the plume to collect and relay data back to Earth. It will have just 15 minutes before it too crashes into the moon, sending up a second, smaller plume for additional studies.

When LCROSS strikes the crater, it is expected to create a hole 16 feet (5 metres) deep and send up a 2.2 million-pound (998,000-kg) plume of debris for sensors and cameras stationed on a second spacecraft to monitor.

Dozens of ground-based telescopes, as well as possibly space observatories, such as the Hubble telescope, will be deployed on the plume as well. Two previous missions, the military's Clementine spacecraft and NASA's Lunar Prospector, determined the moon's south pole is particularly rich in hydrogen, which scientists suspect is mixed with oxygen that forms water.

Water ice could be used to make oxygen for astronauts to breathe, as well as an oxidizer for rocket fuel.

NASA astronauts visited the moon during the late 1960s and early 1970s under the Apollo program but could not not return.

In the aftermath of the 2003 Columbia shuttle disaster, President George W Bush instructed NASA to abandon the shuttle fleet in 2010 and return to the moon by 2020 and then aim for Mars.

UNI VK SY BS0920