[music]
I think that it's in human nature to explore. Understanding the moon better
[music]
Understanding the moon better will help us to understand our neighbors in the solar system.
We're exploiting the solar system here not just the moon. The moon is the
natural next step in in our exploration of our own universe.
[music]
[Tooley] The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter is as its namesake says a reconnaissance
mission to the moon. Our job is to take a suite of very powerful scientific
instruments and make an atlas of the entire moon. In some places in very great
detail, topography, mountain heights, mineralogy, temperatures, abundances of
resources including potentially the intriguing possibility that there's
water at the moon. We put all this together and do a data set by playing
low over the moon for a year this is the data that the people designing the
systems picking the site's need to take us back to the moon. [Vondrak] Well we learned much
about the moon from the Apollo program but now we want to return to the moon
for a more intensive study. We want to be able to go back to the moon so that we
can live there for long periods and work on the moon. So we need a mission that
can help us find the best places to go and determine how to go back there safely.
[music]
[Peddie] We know that you know Neil Armstrong and some of the others had a
difficult time finding a safe landing site. They didn't see it till they got
there. But now with with our instruments we'll be able to tell people ahead of
time look don't go there. [Vondrak] LRO will have a laser system that will give us a high
resolution topographic map of the moon. It also has high resolution cameras that
will identify objects that are only a foot or two in size so that we know
where there are no large boulders that could be a risk to astronauts. [Tooley] So our job
is to literally complete the job of mapping the moon do it at high
resolutions and enable enable the designers of the human systems, the Atlas
they need to pick the safe places to go the beneficial places to go and where
it's most fruitful to go.
[music]
[Peddie] In addition to the safe landing sites, LRO is looking for potential resources.
And why are we doing that? Because it's it's really hard to carry
all your supplies with you. I mean you can do it but you really spend a lot of
not only fuel but cargo space. So it'd be really nice to go to a place that
already has the resources. Whether it's water ice to have water or potential
minerals that we could use as raw materials to make into things that we
would need. [Vondrak] We think the most interesting parts of the Moon may be the polar
regions of the Moon. Because there could be resources there and so we're going to
study intensively the polar regions with LRO. [Tooley] From the Apollo era we chose to go
for good reasons because it was literally the easiest to go to the
equatorial regions and stay a very short time and was very ambitious program. But
but when you look at where would you like to go and stay for a while on the
moon. You begin to realize that probably the poles are the most interesting place
[Keller] Access to solar power continuously that may be the first and most important
reason over you know the near term. And then the possibility of resources being
there. Those may take much longer time before we're able to really exploit
those. But the solar power is something we can exploit right away.
[Vondrak] The second big resource on the moon may be water ice. There's evidence from
earlier missions that in dark places at the poles there may be water at the
surface or below the surface in the form of ice crystals. If it is abundant
astronauts could use this for both human consumption and as a source of rocket
fuel LRO.
LRO will measure for the first time this very energetic component of the
space radiation environment in order to see whether it's going to be a problem
for humans or not. [Tooley] It was one thing to go for a handful of days in Apollo and go
when you knew that the Sun was quiet or you hope the Sun stayed quiet.
And you took the risk you calculated the risk of cancer and such in and you made
a short mission. You're gonna live there longer you need to you need to
understand it well enough to go here's what I need to do to protect myself.
[Peddie] One of the things that we're looking for in the LRO mission is how the high
radiation environment affects our ability to explore. So if we bring
cameras or communication devices you know how will they be impacted by the
cosmic radiation? We need to protect our equipment as well as ourselves.
[music]
[Tooley] When we look back to what we did in LRO and we look at what followed. I think we'll see
a profound impact. We'll see us is really being the small first step where we have
human beings permanently off this planet, getting to move out into the solar
system starting with the moon. As that pans out I think I think will be a small
piece of a profound development that when history looks back to say this time
we went back to the moon this time we we stayed and we when we moved on from
there.
[music]