This blog follows the progress of the LRO mission through Integration and Testing at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and launch site processing at KSC\Astrotech. Its purpose is to enable communication to the entire LRO Team about the status of ongoing activities.

LRO was launched June 18th, 2009 at 5:32pm EDT from KSC. This BLOG will follow the progress of the mission as LRO travels to the Moon and establishes orbit around it.

This BLOG will be periodically updated during LRO's early mission but as the nominal mission unfolds the official NASA LRO website and the LRO Science Instrument's own websites will evolve into a more interesting sources of LRO science results as postings appear there first and LRO engineering and operations (source of this site) will become increasingly routine.

Tuesday, June 30, 2009

LRO Status 6/30/2009 7:05pm EDT

LRO continues to perform flawlessly in her commissioning orbit (30x199km). In addition to the High Gain Antenna and Gyro calibrations that continued today a number of notable accomplishments occurred today:

- LROC cameras turned on for a series of preliminary measurements in preparation for the planned first imaging July 3. All performance was nominal.

- LOLA electronics and detectors powered on (not the lasers). All telemetry was nominal.

- And with the LOLA detectors on we are now tracking LRO with the Next Generation Satellite Laser Ranging System (NGSLR) laser system at the Goddard Geophysical and Astronomical Observatory (GGAO) and have been since about 5:12 pm today! This is a major achievement and has never been done before (tracking a s/c in lunar orbit optically from Earth). We seem to be successful on every shot at 28Hz. Tomorrow we should be able to assess the ranging precision when we get all the data back and can start the analysis.
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