| The Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer orbiter will analyze the moon's atmosphere and help to solve the mystery of its glowing horizons
NASA's newest lunar exploration probe is now sitting atop a Minotaur V launch vehicle — a US Air Force ballistic rocket converted to space use — at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility on Wallops Island, Virginia. Image: NASA Ames/Zion Young
On 6 September, NASA plans to send a vacuum cleaner to the Moon. Called the Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE), the orbiter will collect dust and gas molecules to figure out what floats above the Moon and how it got there. "These mysteries have not really been addressed since the Apollo missions," says Rick Elphic, LADEE project scientist at the NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California. The $263-million project began in 2008 as part of former US president George W. Bush's vision for returning astronauts to the Moon. Lunar dust had been a big problem for the Apollo missions: the sticky, abrasive stuff clung persistently to spacesuits and wore down equipment — breaking the seals on boxes protecting samples of Moon rock, for instance. NASA no longer plans to send people to the Moon. But LADEE could herald a new way of building interplanetary spacecraft. Instead of designing a one-off vehicle specialized for the Moon — NASA's usual approach — LADEE's engineers drew up a blueprint for a craft that can be adapted for other missions, cutting research and development costs. "It could save as much as half of the price," says Peter Klupar, the former director of engineering at Ames. Borrowing a concept from the commercial satellite industry, Klupar and his colleagues designed the spacecraft's body to be modular, built in layers like a cake. Segments can be swapped in and out or customized depending on requirements. For example, one arrangement would yield an orbiter suitable for monitoring the Sun, while another possible configuration could land on asteroids. Eerie glow In each case something was catching the light. Dust motes seemed to be the obvious candidate. With no wind to lift dust from the Moon's surface, researchers suggested solar radiation as the cause. Ultraviolet light and X-rays on the day side of the Moon could strip negatively charged electrons off atoms in the dust during the day, imparting a positive charge to grains. On the dark side, electrons carried by the solar wind could give dust grains a negative charge. In both cases, charged dust particles would repel each other, like strands of hair rubbed by a balloon, allowing clouds of dust to float up from the Moon's surface. Although small-scale laboratory experiments have shown that lunar dust can behave in this way, there has been no definitive detection of this process on the Moon — researchers do not know how much dust could be lifted in this way or how high it could go. An instrument left on the surface by Apollo 17 in 1972 recorded some signs of charged dust particles moving slowly above the surface. "The evidence is circumstantial so far," says Mihály Horányi, a physicist at the University of Colorado Boulder. "There are other possible explanations for the observations." For instance, a 2011 reanalysis of the signal from the surface instrument blamed it on electrical interference from heaters that warmed the instrument at night. Dust detector  via Science - Google News http://news.google.com/news/url?sa=t&fd=R&usg=AFQjCNFcYGxNQniwjtEw3D11hS-KQoztEg&url=http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=moon-mission-to-suck-up-lunar-dust | |||
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