NASA to launch Moon Mission next month

Washington: NASA is making final preparations to launch a small car-sized robotic Moon probe next month in an attempt to answer prevailing questions about the lunar atmosphere.

“The Moon’s tenuous atmosphere may be more common in the solar system than we thought,” said John Grunsfeld, NASA’s associate administrator for science in Washington.

“Further understanding of the Moon’s atmosphere may also help us better understand our diverse solar system and its evolution,” said Grunsfeld.

LADEE was built using a general purpose spacecraft design that allows NASA to develop, assemble and test multiple modules at the same time.

The bus structure is made of a lightweight carbon composite with a mass of 547.2 pounds – 844.4 pounds when fully fuelled.

“This same common bus can be used on future missions to explore other destinations, including voyages to orbit and land on the moon, low-Earth orbit, and near-Earth objects,”