Unmanned NASA lunar craft to lift off from Virginia
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — NASA is headed back to the moon, this time to explore its thin atmosphere and rough dust.
The unmanned spacecraft LADEE will fly to the moon by way of Virginia’s Eastern Shore.
Liftoff is set for late tonight from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility.
Weather permitting, the Minotaur rocket should be visible along much of the East Coast — as far south as South Carolina, as far north as Maine and as far west as Pittsburgh.
LADEE — short for Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer — will be the first spacecraft to be launched into outer space from Wallops. And it will be the first moonshot from Virginia in 54 years of lunar missions.
All but one of NASA’s approximately 40 moon missions — most memorably the manned Apollo flights of the late 1960s and early 1970s — originated from Cape Canaveral. The most recent were the twin Grail spacecraft launched two years ago this weekend. The lone exception, Clementine, a military-NASA venture, rocketed away from southern California in 1994.
Scientists involved in the $280 million, moon-orbiting mission want to examine the lunar atmosphere.
It will take LADEE a month to get close enough to the moon to go into orbit, and another month to check its three scientific instruments. Then, the craft will be maneuvered from 30 to 90 miles above the lunar surface, where it will collect data for just over three months.