Lunar Prospector Status Report #10

January 15, 1998 - 1:00 p.m. EST (10:00 a.m. PST)

As of 10 a.m. PST on Thursday, Jan. 15, 1998, missions operations personnel at the Mission Control Center at NASA's Ames Research Center report that the Lunar Prospector spacecraft continues to operate nominally in its current 2-hour-period orbit.

Now that the spacecraft has been placed in low lunar orbit, radio science data collection has been initiated at the Deep Space Network. These data will be used by the gravity experiment scientist, Alex Konopliv at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), in Pasadena, California, to develop a much more detailed gravity map of the Moon.

The spacecraft is currently in orbit # 37, in its lunar orbit insertion attitude, spinning at 12 rpm. All science instruments are on and collecting excellent data. The spacecraft continues to experience occultations (data blackouts) once each orbit, when it goes behind the Moon and communications are lost. Data is continually saved in a 53-minute, rolling-storage unit on the spacecraft Command and Data Handling (C&DH) device. Currently, occultations are 41-minutes long, approaching the maximum expected length of 47 minutes.

Yesterday, Jan. 14 at 11:34 a.m. PST, 10 science configuration commands were sent to the spacecraft to set the gains on the spectrometer instruments.

Later today, mid-afternoon on Jan. 15 PST, the spacecraft orbit will be trimmed to circularize it to the desired 100 km ± 20 km mapping orbit. After the orbit trim, the spacecraft will be precessed to its nominal mapping orbit attitude, with the spin axis perpendicular to the ecliptic plane.

David Morse
Ames Research Center
Moffett Field, CA 94035