Transcript of LRO’s CRaTER: Man, On the Moon

[Harlan Spence]

Exploration, I think, is at the core of what it means to be human.

[upbeat music]

NASA as an agency and the nation as a whole, has had an initiative to go back to the moon. To go back to the moon safely, requires a reconnaissance mission. The LRO Mission, it stands for Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, it's the first sortie back to the moon, a robotic mission, to measure the conditions, environments and potential landing sites for a manned mission.

CRaTER stands for the Cosmic Ray Telescope for the Effects of Radiation. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter is basically a giant sort of rectangular solid. CRaTER is mounted on the top here. The way I like to think of it, we're the "hood ornament" of LRO.

Our particular piece of the whole LRO mission is to measure the radiation environment. At the Earth we have very strong magnetic fields. That surround the Earth, plus we have a protective atmosphere. And so a lot of charged particles from cosmic rays will be deflected by the Earth's magentic fields. When you go to the moon, you don't have a magnetic field. You don't have an atmosphere. And so you have that same population of particles and now all of them are hitting the surface. Now we have to understand what it means to put a person in the picture. To date we really haven't had a mission where you've had to worry about long term effects of Galactic Cosmic Rays.

The medical community have developed over the years, materials that simulate human tissue. To see how particles of these energies pass through and interact with matter. We have embedded within the telescope two different regions of material. This red material here, it's called Tissue Equivalent Plastic. In space we're using it as literally a simulant for a human, that you would not choose to fly in this environment to do the experiment. Different depths here would represent different depths through your tissue to a blood forming organ.

The CRaTER instrument is really aimed at understanding the effects of these Galactic Cosmic Rays on man in space so that others can take that information and estimate things like long term cancer probabilities and so forth. We already know that we will be discovering things that we don't even know how to think about right now and that's very exciting, new window on the universe.