[meteorite-list] Twin Artemis Probes to Study Moon in 3D

From: Ron Baalke <baalke_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Thu, 14 Jul 2011 08:52:17 -0700 (PDT)
Message-ID: <201107141552.p6EFqHAp002664_at_zagami.jpl.nasa.gov>

July 13, 2011

Media Contact:
Robert Sanders
+1 (510) 643-6998
rsanders at berkeley.edu

** Science contacts appear below. **

Text & Images:
http://newscenter.berkeley.edu/2011/07/13/twin-artemis-probes-to-study-moon-in-3-d/

TWIN ARTEMIS PROBES TO STUDY MOON IN 3-D

On Sunday, July 17, the Moon will acquire its second new companion in
less than a month. That's when the second of two probes built by the
University of California, Berkeley, and part of NASA's five-satellite
THEMIS mission will drop into a permanent lunar orbit after a
meandering, two-year journey from its original orbit around Earth.

The first of the two probes settled into a stable orbit around the
Moon's equator on June 27. If all goes well, the second probe will
assume a similar lunar orbit, though in the opposite direction,
sometime Sunday afternoon. The two spacecraft that comprise the
ARTEMIS mission will immediately begin the first observations ever
conducted by a pair of satellites of the lunar surface, its magnetic
field and the surrounding magnetic environment.

"With two spacecraft orbiting in opposite directions, we can acquire a
full 3-D view of the structure of the magnetic fields near the Moon
and on the lunar surface," said Vassilis Angelopoulos, principal
investigator for the THEMIS and ARTEMIS missions and a professor of
space physics at UCLA. "ARTEMIS will be doing totally new science, as
well as reusing existing spacecraft to save a lot of taxpayer money."

"These are the most fully equipped spacecraft that have ever gone to
the Moon," added David Sibeck, THEMIS and ARTEMIS project scientist at
the Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) in Maryland. "For the first
time we're getting a unique, two-point perspective of the Moon from
two spacecraft, and that will be a major component of our overall
lunar research program."

The transition into a lunar orbit will be handled by engineers at UC
Berkeley's Space Sciences Laboratory (SSL), which serves as mission
control both for THEMIS (Time History of Events and Macroscale
Interactions during Substorms) and ARTEMIS (Acceleration,
Reconnection, Turbulence, and Electrodynamics of the Moon's
Interaction with the Sun).

"We are on our way," said Manfred Bester, SSL director of operations.
"We're committed."

What Makes the Auroras Dance?

The five THEMIS satellites (or probes) were launched by NASA on Feb.
17, 2007, to explore how the Sun's magnetic field and
million-mile-per-hour solar wind interact with Earth's magnetic field
on Earth's leeward side, opposite the Sun. Within a year and a half,
they had answered the mission's primary question: Where and how do
substorms in the Earth's magnetosphere -- which make the auroras at
the north and south poles dance -- originate?

The answer: the storms originate deep in the planet's shadow, about a
third of the way to the Moon, where magnetic field lines snap,
reconnect and unleash a storm of energy that funnels to the poles and
makes the atmosphere glow in reds and greens. Large storms can wreak
havoc on satellites, power grids and communications systems.

Mission accomplished, the THEMIS team was eager to divert two of the
probes to the Moon to extend their magnetic field studies farther into
space. One key reason was that the two probes most distant from Earth
would soon die because, with too much time spent in Earth's shadow,
their solar-powered batteries would discharge.

To achieve this new mission, the UC Berkeley and Goddard teams, with
the assistance of experts at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in
Pasadena, charted the 150 fuel-saving orbital maneuvers needed to
boost the two THEMIS spacecraft from Earth's orbit into temporary
orbits around the two Earth-Moon Lagrange points, which are spots in
space where the gravitational attraction from the Moon and Earth are
equal. That transfer took about 18 months, after which Goddard
colleagues kept the two spacecraft in Lagrange-point orbits for
several months before the first probe (P1) was transferred into lunar
orbit last month.

"That was an engineering challenge; this is the first mission where
we've piloted into a lunar orbit spacecraft not designed to go there,"
said Daniel Cosgrove, the UC Berkeley engineer who controls the
spacecrafts' trajectories. The probes' small thrusters, for example,
only push down and sideways. The probes are also spinning, which makes
maneuvering even more difficult.

Also, last year probe P1 lost a spherical sensor from the end of one
of four long wires that protrude from the spacecraft to measure
electrical fields in space. The probable cause was a micrometeorite
that cut a 10-foot section off of the 82-foot wire and caused it to
retract into its original spherical housing, sending the "little black
sphere flying through the solar system," Bester said.

"All five spacecraft have been built by a very talented team with
enormous attention to detail," he said, predicting that the ARTEMIS
probes could survive for another 10 years, longer than the three
remaining THEMIS probes, which repeatedly fly in and out of Earth's
dangerous Van Allen radiation belt.

Lunar Orbit

Once the second probe, P2, is in orbit, the two ARTEMIS satellites
will graze the lunar surface once per orbit -- approaching within a
few tens of kilometers -- in a belt ranging 20 degrees above and below
the equator while recording electric and magnetic fields and ion
concentrations.

"When the Moon traverses the solar wind, the magnetic field embedded
in the rocks near the surface interacts with the solar wind magnetic
field, while the surface itself absorbs the solar wind particles,
creating a cavity behind the Moon," Angelopoulos said. "We can study
these complex interactions to learn much about the Moon as well as the
solar wind itself from a unique two-point vantage that reveals for the
first time 3-D structures and dynamics."

Sibeck noted that NASA's twin STEREO spacecraft, launched in 2006,
already provide a 3-D perspective on the Sun's large-scale magnetic
fields. "THEMIS and ARTEMIS study the microscale processes, which we
now know run the system," he said.

One goal of the ARTEMIS mission is to look for plasmoids, which are
hot blobs of ionized gas or plasma.

"THEMIS found evidence that magnetic reconnection propels hot blobs of
plasma both towards and away from the Earth, and we want to find out
how big they are and how much energy they carry," Angelopoulos said.
"Plasmoids could be tens of thousands of kilometers across."

"THEMIS found the cause and now ARTEMIS will study the consequences,
which are likely massive and global," Sibeck said.

The spacecraft also will study the surface composition of the Moon by
recording the solar wind particles reflected or scattered from the
surface and the ions sputtered out of the surface by the wind.

"These measurements can tell us about the properties of the surface,
from which we can infer the formation and evolution of the surface
over billions of years," Angelopoulos said.

The two ARTEMIS probes will join NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter,
which has been orbiting the Moon since 2009 taking high-resolution
photographs and looking for signs of water ice. In September, NASA is
scheduled to launch two GRAIL (Gravity Recovery and Interior
Laboratory) spacecraft to map the Moon's gravitational field, and in
2013, the agency plans to launch LADEE (Lunar Atmosphere and Dust
Environment Explorer) to characterize the lunar atmosphere and dust
environment.

"ARTEMIS will provide context for the LADEE mission," Sibeck said.

Three other non-functioning satellites remain in orbit around the
Moon: two subsatellites of Japan's lunar orbiter, Kaguya, which was
guided to a crash on the surface in 2009; and India's Chandrayaan-1,
which lost communication with Earth that same year. China's second
lunar orbiter, Chang'e 2, left the Moon for interplanetary space on
June 8.

Science Contacts:
Vassilis Angelopoulos
+1 (510) 643-1871 Berkeley / +1 (310) 794-7090 UCLA
vassilis at ucla.edu

David Sibeck
+1 (301) 286-5998
david.g.sibeck at nasa.gov

Manfred Bester
+1 (510) 643-1014
mbester at ssl.berkeley.edu

Daniel Cosgrove
+1 (510) 643-4172
cosgrove at ssl.berkeley.edu
Received on Thu 14 Jul 2011 11:52:17 AM PDT