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Upcoming NASA Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter UV Instrument Selected to Fly |
NASA has announced that Dr. Alan Stern, Director of SwRI's Department of Space Studies has been selected to lead the 2008 Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Mars mission's Lyman Alpha Monitoring Project (LAMP) instrument investigation. This is the first SwRI instrument investigation selected to travel to lunar orbit.
LAMP is a compact ultraviolet mapping spectrometer. Its primary job will be to search for and map exposed deposits of water frost near the lunar poles. LAMP will also make maps of permanently shadowed regions deep in the Moon's polar craters, which are of interest for future landing sites. In addition, LAMP will study the tenuous but fascinating lunar atmosphere, and demonstrate a lunar polar night vision system with important application to future robotic and human missions.
LAMP will be built by SwRI, like its sister instruments Pluto-Alice and Rosetta-Alice. The LAMP science team includes Drs. Randy Gladstone, Joel Parker, Kurt Retherford and Dave Slater of SwRI, Dr. Paul Feldman of Johns Hopkins University, and Dr. Dana Crider of Catholic University. SwRI's Ron Black is the Project Manager. LAMP's EPO efforts will be directed by Ms. Polly Andrews of The Denver Museum of Nature & Science.
More information about LAMP can be found in the attached Powerpoint presentation (21MB) or PDF file(5.6MB).