NASA is set to launch its small robotic spacecraft to the moon to analyze mysterious dust on the lunar surface encountered by Apollo astronauts decades ago, Reuters reported.
"It's looking real good," NASA spokesman Keith Koehler said. "We're really excited and really ready to go."
The Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) - pronounced "laddie," not "lady" - will take off at 11:27 p.m. Friday from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility on Wallops Island, Virginia. The launch will also be streamed live in Times Square, Manhattan and viewable online at www.NASA.gov.
CLICK HERE to see a map depicting viewability of the rocket's launch once in air.
Koehler said the skies would be clear with a 95 percent chance the weather would be suitable for liftoff.
40 years ago, astronauts on the last Apollo mission made one of the strangest lunar discoveries to date and LADEE will be going to investigate. Crewmembers said they saw a bizarre glow on the moon's horizon just before sunrise. Apollo 17 commander Eugene Cernan sketched the phenomenon in a notebook. He said it caught the crew off-guard because the moon's airless atmosphere should not be able to reflect light.
Scientists theorized the dust was electrically charged somehow and that was causing it to float off the ground. LADEE will orbit the moon in order to test this theory by gathering data. The astronauts compared the dust to talcum powder and spent gunpowder and said it stuck to their gloves and boots.
LADEE will also transmit information regarding the moon's paper-thin layer of gasses just barely identifiable as an atmosphere. Understanding this type of "exosphere," as scientists call it, will help understand other airless spatial bodies.
Don Cornwell, mission manager for the Lunar Laser Communications Demonstration, said if LADEE's data transmission is successful, a similar method could be used routinely on such missions. Laser data transmission could even be used as early as the 2020 Mars mission.
"We've already been having discussions about, 'Could you do laser com on a rover on the surface of Mars?' ... I think this is just the beginning of what will be replacing some of the radio frequency com in the future," John Grunsfeld, associate administrator for NASA's science mission directorate, told NBC News. "There's no question that as we send humans further out into the solar system, certainly to Mars, if we want to have high-def 3-D video, we're going to have laser com sending that information back."
WATCH the live stream below.
