Transcript of LRO Moon Party

[Cathy Peddie] I just am so happy to see all of you here joining us. I hope you're just as excited as we are that the spacecraft that was built right here at Goddard Space Flight Center, go Goddard, is at the Moon right now, so I hope you all take pride just like we do that we brought, not only ourselves, but NASA back to the Moon after over 40 years, so thank you all for coming.

[music starts]

[Mark Beckman] What you're seeing here is actually the transfer orbit to the Moon for LRO. So LRO there is the white dot, what you do see there is a blue path and a brown path, both going out to the Moon.

[Rich Vondrak] And so the Apollo sites became visible only a few days before the anniversary, so the team at Ar...

[Ron Zellar] ...I'm going to shoot my laser pointer over the heads of my colleagues here, but they don't have to be worried because I have a laser user certificate from Goddard, I know how to operate a laser safely. The pulses leave the ground station and each pulse is six nanoseconds long, which means that it's about six feet long. And by the time it gets to the Moon, its 20 kilometers wide. So 20 kilometers, to put that in perspective for you is about the size of the city of Washington DC.

[laughing]

[offscreen] Good job! Alright, that's a big crater!

[offscreen] Alright!

[sphere movie narration] The Moon is our poetic muse and the intractable promise of lands over the horizon.

[crowd noise]

[crowd cheering]

[clapping]

[kids] Cake! Cake! Cake! Cake!

[music fades]