The Lunar Prospector
In 1992, a science group from NASA addressed some of the many unsolved scientific riddles facing the lunar science community. These riddles includes questions about evolution of the moon, its atmospheric constituents and earth moon system. The Lunar Prospector mission was launched in 1998 from Cape Canaveral using a Lockheed Martin LMLV2 launch vehicle. The Lunar Prospector mission designers selected the following objectives as their primary science requirements for the mission.
1) To search lunar atmosphere and its surface for any kind of potential resources like gases, minerals or even water.
2) To study and map the lunar gravitational and magnetic fields
3) To study about the size, structure and lunar core’s contents.
In order to meet these scientific requirements, the lunar prospector carried a complement of five instruments to map the lunar surface. There were no cameras installed with the setup. Moreover, The Doppler gravity experiment was an additional experiment which used the whole spacecraft itself as an instrument. These installed instruments included Gamma Ray Spectrometer, Neutron Spectrometer, …show more content…
These gamma ray emissions are associated with the elements responsible for its emissions. Each end of the cylinder is mounted with the photomultiplier tubes i.e. one against germanate, and other against the anticoincidence shield. Cylindrical graphite- epoxy laminate housing was used to enclose these tubes. Other possible detections such as penetrating charged particle events were eliminated from the gamma ray detections with the use of anticoincidence shield. Processes like digitalization, recording and discrimination between events were done with the help of GRS front end electronics. The GRS on board had a mass of 8 Kg, power average of 3 Watts and a bit rate average of 0.688