LRO is currently circling the moon in an elliptical orbit, ranging from a low point about 30 miles (50 kilometers) over the moon’s south pole and a high point around 110 miles (180 kilometers) over the lunar north pole, Petro said. Apollo 11 landing site captured from 24 km (15 miles) above the surface by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. Credits: NASA Goddard/Arizona State University “I hesitate to talk about the legacy of a mission that’s still ongoing,” Petro said in an interview Tuesday with Spaceflight Now. The unit measures the spacecraft’s rotation rates, and ground teams are using LRO’s star tracker cameras to derive an estimate of the orbiter’s rotation, reserving the rest of the inertial measurement unit’s lifetime for critical events such as emergencies and eclipses. Last year, engineers determined LRO’s inertial measurement unit was nearing the end of its life. The transmitter on LRO’s radar instrument failed in 2011, but ground teams devised a way to use ground-based radars coupled with the still-functioning receiver on LRO to image the moon in search of water ice deposits. “Some systems are showing signs of age, but that is what engineers love to try to solve … and they’ve been able to figure out a way to keep it going.” That has really given us the ability to continue operating. “Ever since about 2011, we’ve been in a very … fuel-efficient orbit, so we’ve basically been able to save our fuel for the last seven or eight years now. “The spacecraft is remarkably healthy,” Petro said. NASA officials expect LRO to live up to its “reconnaissance” function into the 2020s, providing maps for robotic lunar landers and helping identify sites where humans could safely return to the moon’s surface. There’s enough propellant left on LRO to continue the mission for at least seven more years, based on the current rate of fuel consumption, he said. LRO is still operating, and all seven of its instruments are still collecting data, Petro said. “I like to think of the moon as the eighth continent of the Earth, and when we study the moon, we learn about the ancient history of the solar system, as well as the current history of the solr system.” “The moon is an extension of the Earth,” Petro said. “The great strides that we’ve made in understanding the volatile inventory on the moon, beginning to understand the volatile cycle on the moon, and beginning to understand the volcanic history of the moon is something that we’ve made incredible contributions to,” said Noah Petro, LRO’s project scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. In its 10-year mission, LRO has contributed to new discoveries of water and other volatile molecules on the moon, located fresh lunar impact craters, and found that the moon was contracting in its recent history, and may still be shrinking today, due to the cooling of lunar interior. By mid-July of that year, the orbiter’s sharp-eyed camera captured the first detailed views of the Apollo landing sites in time for the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission. LRO launched June 18, 2009, from Cape Canaveral aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket and arrived in lunar orbit four-and-a-half days later. companies and international space agencies select destinations for moon landers. Scientists marked the 10th anniversary of the launch of NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter on Tuesday, celebrating a mission that has greatly outlived its original one-year design life and continues taking high-resolution pictures to help U.S. Artist’s concept of the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.
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