Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Launch, Launch through Orbit Discussion Options

[Greg Hullender]

Since the LRO passed its Mission Rehersal today and is on track to launch on Wednesday next week, it seems like a good time to start a thread about the launch.

http://lunar.gsfc.nasa.gov/launch.html

From the link above, there will be a pre-launch webcast on Tuesday morning.

The launch is scheduled for 3:51 PM EDT (12:51 PDT) which is 1951 GMT Wednesday June 17. [Corrected -- thanks Gsnorgathon!]

When it actually starts sending back pictures, someone should probably start a separate thread, but I think it makes sense to have the launch discussion separate from both the Development and the Cool Pictures threads.

--Greg

[BrianJ]

The rocket Centaur along with the shepherding space LCROSS will be traveling many elongated loops around Earth and Moon (going from South to North of Moon at 70 degree angle inclination) until the impact (both in a interval of 4 minutes, First Centaur and later LCROSS) at approximately October 8, 2009.

Nominal impact date for a launch today (18th) is 9th Oct 11:30:00 UTC

It will take a while for LCROSS to arrive, but we do get some calibration images during the swingby in only a few days.

One of the guys at ARC was kind enough to send me a snippet of STK pos/vel/attitude data for the LCROSS-Centaur lunar flyby trajectory for the 21st June launch opportunity. Here's a couple of Celestia renderings of the instrument calibration pointing sequence(about 1hr after closest approach). First clip is external view, second clip is instrument line-of-sight, both at 20x time accel.

External view:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xfwDFdunJCQ

Instrument line-of-sight:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2BXCgCqvj8

Good luck LRO and LCROSS! (and keep that rain away for the next 3hrs !)

Regards,
Brian

[Paolo]

cool! Thank you!