NASA will launch another lunar scouting spacecraft on the same Atlas V rocket with Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO): the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS). This mission is not a typical scouting mission.
In 1999, a precursor of LRO and LCROSS called the Lunar Prospector detected traces of concentrated hydrogen at the lunar poles. As a result, the LCROSS mission\’s main goal is to confirm the presence or absence of water in a permanently shadowed crater near a lunar polar region. At the present time, landing a probe on the lunar surface and performing excavations or drilling would be very expensive. A less expensive solution for the LCROSS mission is to use a kinetic impactor to excavate a crater on the surface of the Moon.
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