LADEE: 100 Days of Lunar Science

Blast Off!

Friday September 6th, the Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer, or LADEE (exactly how Scotty of the Starship Enterprise would pronounce it), will launch across the midnight Virginia sky up towards the Moon. If the sky remains clear, LADEE’s launch may be seen against a midnight black canvas by millions across the East Coast of the United States. (Someone send me a photo!)

To conserve fuel for its planned low orbit observation of the Moon, LADEE will take a relatively leisurely journey of a month in time to get to its target. As a frame of reference it took the Apollo missions only about 3 days to get there! Upon arrival, LADEE will begin 100 days of lunar science, followed by a crash landing on the Moon’s surface.

100 Days

At a cost of just over a quarter billion dollars, LADEE is one of NASA’s cheaper missions, though it still has hefty goals. LADEE’s aims, says NASA, are to “determine the composition of the lunar atmosphere” and “characterize the lunar exospheric dust environment”.

Our very own Earth has an exosphere, which lies atop the rest of our atmosphere (troposphere, stratosphere, mesosphere & thermosphere), and acts as the final boundary between our planet and outer space. The Moon, unlike us, lacks the rest of the layers, leaving it with a very thin boundary. Exospheres are also our solar system’s most common type of atmosphere. Several other celestial bodies like moons, planets like Mercury, and even some asteroids, are believed to have this type of atmosphere. Since exospheres are relatively common, NASA has identified the Moon as the ideal (and cheap) place to study them, and in turn, learn much more about the other space objects covered by this thin veil.

The LADEE mission also hopes to solve an old Apollo mystery. When the Apollo astronauts originally arrived in orbit of the Moon, they reported seeing a golden glow on the horizon outside their pod (get an idea of it above). LADEE hopes to determine why this happens, perhaps from Moon dust particles ignited by the Moon’s exosphere.

Space Internet?

One of the final tasks that LADEE is taking part in is a test aimed at increasing communication times between Earth and its various future probes, ships and colonies. NASA hopes to establish laser-based high-speed communication between LADEE and Earth and take a step forward in creating what S. Pete Worden, Director of NASA’s Ames Research Center, dubbed “solar system wide broadband”.

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If you’re on the East Coast of the US this Friday, make sure to look up around 11:30PM and you may see the beginning of some fascinating lunar history!

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