That will be followed by deployment of an unmanned lunar orbiter mission along with a nuclear-powered landing vehicle to support lunar rover delivery and sample return operations.
Between 1966 and 1967, NASA sent five Lunar Orbiter spacecraft to the moon to capture images before the arrival of Apollo 11, which landed on the lunar suface July 20, 1969.
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Fortunately, the Lunar Orbiter tapes were found.
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After launching a lunar orbiter later this year, scientists will begin the process of choosing among several competing rover designs for exploring the Moon's geology and terrain, and now the first of these candidates has been unveiled for public consumption.
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Months after the back-to-back, mission-ending dives, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter flew over the crash sites and imaged the final resting spots.
"There's no physical difference in the moon, " said Noah Petro, scientist for the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
Scientists at NASA decided to test their ability to communicate via laser to the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) by sending an image of the famous painting.
The enigmatic "Mona Lisa" countenance was digitized and traveled via laser almost 240, 000 miles from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, to the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.
As the pair of probes took their final plunge, Nasa's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) had been manoeuvred into the right place to see the spacecraft slam into an unnamed 2, 500m mountain.
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Even the reconnaissance orbiter had to wait until sunlight streamed to the northern lunar region.
In 1966, Orbiter 1 was launched from Cape Kennedy and became the first spacecraft to transmit Lunar photographs of possible landing sites.
The "Mona Lisa" experiment was transmitted at a slow data rate of about 300 bits per second, but the "pathfinding achievement sets the stage for ... high data rate laser-communication demonstrations that will be a central feature of NASA's next moon mission, the Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer, " said Goddard's Richard Vondrak, the orbiter's deputy project scientist.
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