spacetoday.net: Atlas to launch LRO

Posted: Sun, Jul 30, 2006, 1:52 PM ET (1752 GMT)
Atlas 5 launch of MRO (ILS)

NASA has awarded Lockheed Martin a contract to launch the space agency's first lunar mission in a decade on an Atlas 5. Lockheed will launch the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) spacecraft on an Atlas 5 401 from Cape Canaveral no earlier than the end of October 2008, under a $136.2-million contract announced Friday. LRO is the first NASA mission to the Moon since the Lunar Prospector mission in 1998, and the first in a series of robotic precursor missions that will eventually lead to a human return to the Moon before 2020, as part of the overall Vision for Space Exploration. The same rocket will also carry, as a secondary payload, the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS), a small spacecraft that will look for evidence for water ice in the Moon's south polar regions by observing the impact of the Centaur upper stage, and then crashing into the Moon itself.