A rocket built from retired nukes lifts a moon probe off Wallops Island
For years, lunar missions had launched from Cape Canaveral or Kennedy Space Center, never from the quiet spaceport on Virginia's Eastern Shore. On the night of September 6, 2013, at 11:27 p.m., a five-stage Minotaur V rocket rose from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport on Wallops Island carrying NASA's LADEE spacecraft. Clear skies let observers as far away as Maine and South Carolina watch the ascent and staging. It was the first lunar mission ever launched from Wallops.
Minotaur V used decommissioned LGM-118 Peacekeeper missiles as the lower stages of a NASA launch vehicle for lunar science. The mission also proved a second American spaceport, run jointly by NASA and Virginia, could send a spacecraft to the moon, the first time a lunar mission launched from anywhere other than Kennedy Space Center.
QHow far apart were LADEE and Earth when its laser system set a data transmission record?
The Lunar Laser Communication Demonstration beamed data across 385,000 kilometers, roughly 239,000 miles, linking the orbiting spacecraft to a ground station on Earth. The test ran on October 18, 2013, about two weeks after LADEE settled into lunar orbit. The instrument was a pulsed laser system, a technology distinct from the radio links NASA had relied on for decades of deep space communication. It shared the mission with three science instruments built to study the moon's thin atmosphere and dust. The laser test set a record for data transmitted from lunar orbit to Earth.
QWhat was neon doing in the moon's atmosphere, according to LADEE's instruments?
LADEE's Neutral Mass Spectrometer detected neon in the lunar exosphere, confirming the presence of a gas scientists had suspected but never directly measured there. The spacecraft's science payload also included a UV-Vis Spectrometer and the Lunar Dust EXperiment, both built to characterize the thin haze of gas and dust clinging to the moon's surface. NASA Ames Research Center handled LADEE's daily operations while Goddard Space Flight Center ran the sensor suite. The neon finding was one of several direct measurements LADEE made of the lunar exosphere.
QWhat did LADEE's dust readings end up helping track after a foreign spacecraft landed on the moon?
Data from LADEE's dust instrument was later used to track exhaust and dust kicked up by China's Chang'e 3 lunar lander, giving scientists a way to measure how debris from a landing spreads and settles in the moon's near-vacuum environment. That secondary use came after LADEE's primary seven-month mission studying the lunar exosphere and dust environment around the equator. LADEE also earned a 2014 Popular Mechanics Breakthrough Award for that dust-tracking work. LADEE cost roughly $280 million total, covering spacecraft development, launch services, and mission operations, a modest price for data that ended up useful well beyond its own flight plan.
