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[b]Space Cover 732: Lunar Prospector[/b] Today's Space Cover of the Week was postmarked on January 8, 1998, for the launch of the robotic Lunar Prospector mission to orbit the Moon. It was postmarked at NASA's Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, CA, home of the Lunar Prospector Mission Control. The cachet on the cover was designed and applied by me. Lunar Prospector was one of the NASA Discovery Program missions. It was designed to perform a low polar orbit investigation of the Moon. This included mapping the surface composition and locating lunar resources, measuring magnetic and gravity fields, and studying outgassing events. The data from this mission, which carried only scientific instruments, complemented the image data from the 1994 Clementine mission, which carried mostly cameras. Clementine had detected the presence of water frozen down inside some permanently shadowed craters near the lunar south pole, and Lunar Prospector verified and mapped significant amounts of frozen water inside those craters. Lunar Prospector coasted for four days to the Moon before being inserted into a polar capture orbit on January 12, 1998. It incrementally lowered its lunar orbit to a circular 62-mile (100 km) high mapping orbit on January 16, 1998. The probe spent 11 months taking data before being lowered to a 25-mile (40 km) orbit for higher resolution studies on December 19. 1998. On January 28, 1999, Lunar Prospector began an extended mission, changing to a 9x28-mile (15x45 km) orbit. The mission ended on July 31, 1999, when Lunar Prospector was steered into a deliberate collision with the Moon in a permanently shadowed area of the Shoemaker crater near the lunar south pole. It was hoped that the impact would liberate water vapor from the suspected ice deposits in the crater and that the plume would be detectable from Earth; however, no such plume was observed. The cover above was postmarked that day at Moffett Field, and again the cachet was designed and applied by me. The selection of the Shoemaker crater was especially poignant because a small vial of the ashes of the late lunar geologist Eugene Shoemaker was onboard. Shoemaker trained the Apollo crews on lunar geology, earning effusive praise in John Young's autobiography "Forever Young". Shoemaker was also the co-discoverer of Comet Shoemaker-Levy which crashed into the planet Jupiter in 1994. It was a fitting end for him to be buried on the Moon in the crater named after him… [i][b]Above[/b]: An artist's concept of Lunar Prospector in orbit around the Moon.[/i] (NASA) Anyone else have some favorite Lunar Prospector covers? Let's post them!
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