NASA Launch Shoots for the Moon Tonight: Watch Online
NASA will launch a new spacecraft tonight to unlock the mysteries of moon dust and the wispy lunar atmosphere, and you can watch the blastoff live online.
The space agency’s Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer, nicknamed LADEE, is poised to liftoff atop a brand new Minotaur V rocket from Wallops Island, Va., at 11:27 p.m. EDT in what will be the first-ever lunar mission to launch from Virginia. Weather permitting, the nighttime launch may be visible to millions of observers along a wide swath of the U.S. East Coast that stretches from Maine to North Carolina.
But for observers outside the viewing area, NASA has two webcasts to offer live video views of tonight’s planned moon shot. You can watch the LADEE launch live on SPACE.com beginning at 9:30 p.m. EDT, courtesy of NASA TV.
A second webcast, viewable at the same time, will be streamed by the agency’s NASA Edge team. Spaceflight Now is also providing blow-by-blow coverage of LADEE’s mission via the Mission Status Center, which will also include a launch webcast feed.
Targeting a Moon Dust Mystery
The $280 million LADEE moon mission (pronounced “laddie,” not “lady”) will investigate the tenuous atmosphere of the moon and study how moon dust behaves above the lunar surface. Apollo astronauts first spotted a strange lunar glow on the moon’s horizon during NASA’s lunar landing missions in the 1960s and 1970s, but scientists still do not understand what causes the strange phenomenon.
"Sometimes we get a little bit surprised when we start talking about a lunar atmosphere, because most of us were taught in school that the moon doesn’t actually have an atmosphere,” Sarah Noble, NASA’s LADEE program scientist, said Thursday. “It does, but it’s very, very thin.”
The moon has what scientists call an “exosphere.” That is, an atmosphere so thin that its individual molecules don’t interact with each other. The Earth has an exosphere too, though it is located hundreds of miles up, higher than the orbit of the International Space Station.
On the moon, this exosphere is extremely close to the surface, making it a good target to study in order to learn how such atmospheres behave over time. Similar exospheres have been spotted on Mercury, the icy moons of planets in the outer solar systems, and even some asteroids, Noble said.
"It turns out to be the most common class of atmosphere we have, and yet it is one we don’t really know much about," she added
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