Lunar Prospector: The Key to Lunar
Exploration
LRI's Director, Dr. Alan Binder, was the creator, driving
force and Principal Investigator of the Lunar Prospector (LP)
Mission which mapped the Moon from a low, polar orbit - the first
NASA supported mission to explore the Moon in over 25 years. The
LP Spacecraft and Mission were defined and designed by Dr. Binder
to demonstrate the utility, cost effectiveness and commercial
viability of small, simple spacecraft for conducting Lunar and
Planetary exploration. By doing so he expected to open the door
to the global scale, commercial exploration of the Moon and its
resources with the ultimate goal of returning Humankind to the
Moon to develop the first extraterrestrial colony. The spectacular
success of the mission met his expectation as follows:
Programmatically - Under Dr. Binder's hands-on management
of both the Lockheed Martin team of engineers who built, tested
and launched LP and the Mission Operations Team, of which he was
the Mission Director, the Spacecraft was flight-ready only 2 years
after the start of construction and the total mission cost was
only $63 million or about 10% of that of an equivalent NASA defined
and managed mission.
Engineering - The Spacecraft was built by a team of about
40 Lockheed Martin engineers, was controlled by a Mission Operations
Team of about 20 scientists and engineers and performed flawless
during the entire 19 month mission.
Scientifically - The LP science data was a factor of
10 better than promised. All of the nominal 1 year mission objectives
were accomplished within the first seven months of the mission,
generally at substantially better resolution (60 km) than promised
(150 km). Some of the highlights of the scientific results are
the discovery of a few billion tons of water ice near the lunar
poles - a discovery which opens the door to low cost human activities
on the Moon, the first complete mapping of the lunar field, the
lunar magnetic fields, and the global elemental compositional
mapping of the Moon.
The Lunar Prospector Mission is chronicled in a
book entitled "Lunar Prospector: Against All Odds". For an overview of the book along with
ordering information click
here.
|