NASA Has High Hopes for Low-Budget Moon Mission

NASA spent $25 billion on the Apollo moon program, but a new low-budget, robotic lunar mission announced by the agency Tuesday is expected to yield a big scientific payoff for just $59 million, ranking it as one of the cheapest trips out of Earth orbit in history.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration said it has authorized the development of a new spacecraft to explore the unmapped regions of the moon, part of the Discovery series of low-cost missions that the agency hopes will infuse new life into planetary exploration.

The mission has a definite California flavor: The spacecraft will be built by Lockheed Corp.’s Sunnyvale unit, which will get assistance in building some of the scientific instruments from the nearby NASA Ames Research Center. Launch is scheduled for June, 1997.

Although NASA sent six teams of astronauts to the moon during the Apollo missions, the agency believes that there are still many unknowns. The new lunar mission, officials said, holds enormous potential for helping understand the origins of the solar system.

“There is a general misconception that because we went to the moon and landed in six places that we understand the moon,” said Alan B. Binder, Lockheed’s chief for the mission. “But the moon is a big place, as large as North and South America combined. We are all trying to understand how the planets formed and the moon is key to that.”

Lunar materials are the same as many of those that formed the Earth (and perhaps other planets) but, because of the lack of a lunar atmosphere and other factors, they remain in a state closer to their original form.

The probe, called the Lunar Prospector, will map the chemical composition of the surface, the magnetic fields and the gravity fields of the moon from low lunar orbit. The spacecraft, just over four feet in diameter and relying on a simple spin stabilization system, will also search for gas releases from the moon’s surface.

The final Apollo missions carried mapping instruments, but were able to cover just 10% to 20% of the lunar surface. Nonetheless, the results proved that mapping was crucial to understanding the evolution of the moon, Binder said.

The Lunar Prospector would carry three different types of spectrometers, instruments that allow scientists to investigate the composition of materials by capturing and analyzing radiation emissions.

Wesley Huntress, NASA’s space science chief, said the quest to understand the composition of the moon has enormous scientific payoff in finally learning how it was formed. Huntress cited theories holding that the moon was formed when a body collided with Earth early in geologic history.

Huntress said the agency has also narrowed the scope of other proposals in the Discovery program and will select one of three remaining proposals to begin development by the end of 1995.

All three proposals involve California-based laboratories, universities or contractors. Two of the missions would return various samples from space to Earth, for the first time since the Apollo missions. The proposals:

* An effort to capture atomic particles from the sun by flying a probe with a collection device through the solar wind and returning the materials to Earth for analysis. The effort is led by Donald Burnett, a Caltech scientist, and Martin Marietta Astronautics, which would build the spacecraft.

* The deployment of 16 atmospheric probes into the swirling clouds of Venus, which would help unravel the mystery of the ferocious winds that travel 60 times faster than the planet surface rotates. Past U.S. and Russian efforts have failed to accurately model the atmosphere because the instruments were not accurate enough, but Harvard University scientist Richard Goody hopes to succeed by using missile probes built by Hughes Aircraft. The Hughes Space and Communications unit in El Segundo would build the spacecraft as well.

* Capturing interstellar dust particles by flying a spacecraft into the tail of the comet called P/Wild 2 and returning the dust to Earth for analysis. The effort is led by Donald Brownlee, a University of Washington scientist, with participation by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena and Martin Marietta Astronautics in Denver.