The Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) is a space exploration mission scheduled for launch in mid 2013. During its nominal 100 day science mission, LADEE will orbit around the Moon's equator, and use instruments aboard the spacecraft to study the lunar exosphere and dust in the Moon's vicinity. Instruments will include a dust detector, a neutral mass spectrometer, and an ultraviolet-visible spectrometer, as well as a technology demonstration, a laser communications (lasercomm) terminal. LADEE was announced during the presentation of NASA's FY09 budget in February 2008. It will be launched aboard a Minotaur V from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport.
Read more about Lunar Atmosphere And Dust Environment Explorer: Mission Objectives, Instruments, Launch, Propulsion System, Image Gallery
Famous quotes containing the words lunar, atmosphere, dust, environment and/or explorer:
“A bird half wakened in the lunar noon
Sang halfway through its little inborn tune.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“Friendship among nations, as among individuals, calls for constructive efforts to muster the forces of humanity in order that an atmosphere of close understanding and cooperation may be cultivated.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)
“And then finally there’s your grandmother
Sweeping the dust of the nineteenth century
Into the twentieth, and your grandfather plucking
A straw out of the broom to pick his teeth.”
—Charles Simic (b. 1938)
“... several generations of slum environment will produce a slum heredity ...”
—Albion Fellows Bacon (1865–1933)
“Treading the soil of the moon, palpating its pebbles, tasting the panic and splendor of the event, feeling in the pit of one’s stomach the separation from terra ... these form the most romantic sensation an explorer has ever known ... this is the only thing I can say about the matter. The utilitarian results do not interest me.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)