NASA launches mission to study moondust

While the world has been focused on the Curiosity rover on Mars, another NASA space mission has been quietly working towards its launch for a mission much closer to Earth. The LADEE probe (Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer) was launched on September 6th, 2013 and is now making for the moon to study the lunar atmosphere.

This goal will surprise many people who understood that the moon has no atmosphere. In fact, when moon exploration stopped, space scientists still believed this to be the case but new observations changed that theory. Programme scientist Sarah Noble said "It's just it's really, really thin." The atmospheric density is about 1/100,000 that of the Earth's atmosphere. She went one to explain "It's so thin that the individual molecules are so few and far between that they don't interact with each other; they never collide. It's something we call an exosphere."

The mission will also study moondust. Not as it sits on the surface but as it floats above the surface in thin wispy clouds. These were spotted by Apollo astronauts when they were on the moon without realising what they were seeing. It is now believed that dust particles on the moon's surface become electrically charged and lift off to shallow depths, causing a glow in the distance.

The payload aboard LADEE consists of a UV-vis spectrometer to study molecules in the lunar atmosphere, a neutral mass spectrometer to measure changes in the atmosphere over multiple lunar orbits in different space environments, and a lunar dust experiment which will collect and analyse dust from the atmosphere.

Another innovation will be the transfer of information back to the Earth via lasers to achieve broadband transmission speeds which will be far faster than the conventional radio transmissions.

LADEE will take about 30 days to reach the moon in an energy-efficient journey followed by a 30-day set-up period before the 100 days of experimentation begin at orbits of 20-60 km from the surface. It's end will be dramatic with LADEE crashing onto the moon when it's fuel supply runs out.