NASA launches GRAIL lunar probes
The launch of NASA's GRAIL(Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory) spacecraft from Cape Canaveral, Fla., Saturday, Sept. 10, 2011. / NASA TV
KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla., - A United Launch Alliance Delta 2 rocket blasted off and boosted two NASA science satellites into space Saturday, the first step in a $496 million mission to map the moon's gravity and probe its hidden interior.
By precisely measuring the distance between the two spacecraft as they orbit the moon - and thus the subtle effects of the moon's gravity as they sail over visible and sub-surface geologic structures - scientists will be able to determine the nature of the moon's enigmatic core and perhaps confirm or refute theories about how the moon formed some 4.5 billion years ago, reports CBS News space analyst Bill Harwood.
"There have been many missions that have gone to the moon, orbited the moon, landed on the moon, brought back samples of the moon," said Maria Zuber, principal investigator of the Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) mission. "But the missing piece of the puzzle in trying to understand the moon is what the deep interior is like.
"Is there a core? How did the core form? How did the interior convect? What are the impact basins on the near-side flooded with magma and give us this man-in-the-moon shape whereas the back side of the moon doesn't have any of this? These are all mysteries that despite the fact we've studied the moon before, we don't understand how that has happened. GRAIL is a mission that is going to tell us that."
GRAIL (Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory) Mission (NASA.gov)
CBS News: Space Place (Bill Harwood blog)
It also may help inspire school kids to take more of an interest in science. Each satellite is equipped with four cameras sponsored by former shuttle astronaut Sally Ride's science education company that can be used by students around the world to photograph the lunar surface.
"While GRAIL is performing its gravitational experiments, MoonKam will serve as eyes on the moon for Earth's students," said Leesa Hubbard, an educator with Sally Ride Science. "And how they will do that is through the use of these cameras.
Artist's rendition of the twin GRAIL spacecraft mapping the moon's gravity field. Radio signals traveling between the two spacecraft provide scientists the exact measurements required as well as flow of information not interrupted when the spacecraft are at the lunar far side.
/ NASA/JPL-Caltech"This program is available at no cost to schools, and students are going to be able to take their very own photos. This is what's going to make the difference. We know there are lots of images of the moon out there, but this gives students their own ownership of that."
High winds aloft forced the NASA launch team to pass up two one-second launch windows Thursday and concern about a heater that ran longer than expected during detanking prompted another 24-hour slip.
More high winds Saturday forced NASA to pass up the first of two "instantaneous" launch windows, but a final weather balloon showed conditions were acceptable and at 9:08:52 a.m. EDT (GMT-4), the Delta 2 roared to life and vaulted away from complex 17B at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.
It was the 110th and final planned flight of a Delta 2 from Cape Canaveral and while ULA has enough hardware on hand to build a final five medium-lift Delta 2s, any future flights of the workhorse rocket almost certainly will be launched from the West Coast.
As such, the GRAIL launch marked the end of an era after more than 22 years of memorable Delta 2 flights, including 49 Global Positioning System navigation satellites and all of NASA's recent Mars missions, including the enormously successful Spirit and Opportunity rovers.
Equipped with nine strap-on solid-fuel boosters for extra power, GRAIL's Delta 2 was programmed to boost the twin spacecraft onto looping 2.6-million-mile trajectories to the moon, a low-energy approach that allowed the use of a less expensive, medium-lift rocket.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_spin-off
This list is nowhere near complete. Medical technology alone would be worth the cost. Think of this next time you have a medical procedure done that was made possible by NASA spinoff technology.
"There was a particular component of the Gemini life support-system module which produced H2O (water) among other things. This was a byproduct of a recurring chemical reaction of one of the mechanical devices on the life-support module. The astronauts would use this water to drink during their space flight. The problem was, the astronauts did not like the taste of the water because of some of the byproducts produced, which were not harmful of course. So, they added Tang to make the water taste better."[6]
Not to long ago a guy was sent to prison for stealing moon rocks. He tried to sell them and got caught. No locked doors, cameras, guards, web cam were guarding these moon rocks that cost the lives of Grissom, Chaffe and White when these brave men were burned alive on the launch pad. These rocks that are worth BILLIONS, that I have been paying for since my first job as a dishwasher in 1970 up till now. I have never seen a moon rock at a museum or anywhere else. I do not drink Tang or use velcro in my daily life. The transistor that eliminated vacuum tubes and started the computer age was invented by smart guys at IBM. So when I see another space project that could give us millions of doctors, PHD'S, Engineers, health care, or better teachers instead, I think of those moon rocks the US public has never seen in a traveling exhibit and paid for. As a veteran I saw resource's go to space while I went without in a war zone. How can we as Americans trust you fools with another space folly sucking the future wealth of this country so you can put your findings in a room that a guy is going to try and sell on ebay in 3011? This is nothing but pork for another politician. We could have built every bridge in the USA out of Stainless steel instead of getting rocks that wound up on ebay.
As I said, being from the midwest I have never seen the moon rocks. Driving from Wisconsin to Johnson Space Center in Texas, and back, 2000 miles is not on my bucket list.
The Apollo 11 samples — and samples from almost every Apollo mission until the last one in December 1972 — have been securely housed on the 4th floor of the physics department's Compton Laboratory and used by numerous WUSTL researchers, including many members of the McDonnell Center for the Space Sciences. The McDonnell Center was established in 1974, with Walker as its inaugural director.
Today, the remaining lunar samples in Compton Hall that arrived in 1969 from the Apollo 11 mission and from subsequent Apollo missions in the 1970s are being painstakingly prepared for a return trip to Houston to NASA's moon rocks repository, the Lunar Sample Building at the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas.
"The samples have been exhaustively analyzed and numerous papers have been published showing interesting research results," says Ernst K. Zinner, Ph.D., research professor of physics and of earth and planetary sciences, who joined Walker's lab in 1972 studying Apollo mission samples before focusing on analysis of stellar dust grains found in primitive meteorites.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/07/090717150254.htm
Tang was famously used by some early NASA manned space flights. In 1962, when Mercury astronaut John Glenn conducted eating experiments in orbit, Tang was selected for the menu,[2] and was also used during some Gemini flights. A NASA engineer working on Gemini explained how and why it was used (paraphrased):
"There was a particular component of the Gemini life support-system module which produced H2O (water) among other things. This was a byproduct of a recurring chemical reaction of one of the mechanical devices on the life-support module. The astronauts would use this water to drink during their space flight. The problem was, the astronauts did not like the taste of the water because of some of the byproducts produced, which were not harmful of course. So, they added Tang to make the water taste better."[6]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tang_(drink)
....apparently it worked