美国宇航局展开新一轮的月球探索

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Now from the Boston Museum of Science Sci-tech today on NECN.

We are headed to the moon on Sci-tech today. NASA recently launched two robotic missions and in an effort to learn more about the moon and its environment. Joining us now from the Museum of Science Boston is researcher Tony Case, a graduate student at Boston University. Good to have you with us, Tony. Good to be here, thanks for having me.

So what can you tell us about these missions?
Well, LRO is a spacecraft that's around the moon right now. It's orbiting really close to the surface. It's about 30 miles above the surface of the moon. And there're seven instruments on the spacecraft, they are all taking a wide array of measurements of the entire surface of the moon. Along with LRO launching on the same rocket was another spacecraft called LCROSS, which is on its way to the moon now. And the main goal of both of these missions was basically that open an advance scout to gather information that might enable us go back to the moon more safely and more easily in the future if we choose to do so with manned missions.

Interesting, alright in the long names of these, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter is the LRO and the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite is LCROSS.That's right.

What kind of information do we need to get from these satellites to help us to someday return to the moon.

Well LRO is giving us a lot of different information and the one piece of information that is personally close to my heart is the instrument that I worked on and what it measures is radiation--the radiation environment around the moon. So this radiation is, it's energetic particles that are coming from outside of the solar system and also from our own sun. And it can cause damage both to human cells and to electronics. So this is the instrument we built to measure that radiation. It's called CRATER---- the Cosmic Ray Telescope for the Effects of Radiation. So this is around the moon now this is a testing version but the flight model is around the moon. And it's measuring the radiation right now.

All right, and that was developed at BU and MIT .
It was,yeah, along with other institutions ,but yeah it headed here in Boston.

Pretty exciting. What about water? They are looking for water and how important it is to find it or not find it?

Well yeah.That's one of the main goals of both the LRO missions and the LCROSS missions to find water along with any other resources that we might be able to use. So LRO is..ha..has different imagers that are taking images of the surface that might tell us whether there is water there, and also the LCROSS spacecraft is designed almost exclusively to search for this water. So LCROSS has it launched along with LRO on the same rocket and when we detached from LCROSS, it stayed attach to the empty fuel tank left over from the rocket. So tomorrow morning about 7:30 in the morning LCROSS leaves the fuel tank. The fuel tank flies in to the surface of the moon, impacts and throws up a huge dust cloud. So hopefully in this dust cloud, will be dust along with anything else might have been mixed in along with the //（请高手指点） on the moon in the soil. And so as LCROSS flies to this dust could, it's able to measure everything that's in that dust hopefully confirming the presence of water.

All right very very interesting, TONY CASE, a graduate student of BU. Thanks very much for joining us. Thanks a lot.

And we will let people know that tomorrow at the Museum of Science from 9 to 1 you can watch video of LCROSS impact and see presentations by the CRATER team they will be on hand to answer questions about LRO and LCROSS and to demonstrate the instrument.
 taking a wide array of measurements: 做各类测试