Spaceship scouting moon enters lunar orbit

NASA's unmanned lunar spacecraft is now in orbit around the moon after a 4-day journey from Earth, the start of a mission to scout the moon's environment in preparation for future manned endeavours.

The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter entered orbit at 6:27 a.m. ET on Tuesday, but it will take the spacecraft close to two months before it enters its mission orbit of about 50 kilometres above the moon's cratered surface.

Once in mission orbit, the spacecraft will use its suite of scientific instruments to compile high-resolution, three-dimensional maps of the lunar surface. The probe will also map the moon's craters for permanently shadowed and sunlit regions, information useful for planning potential locations of a moon base.

In 2006, NASA laid out its ambitious plans to send people back to the moon in 2020 and begin work on a lunar base in 2024.

Several other countries with space ambitions, including China, Russia and Japan, also unveiled plans to establish their own base there and have begun work to analyze the moon's surface. Earlier this month, Japan crash-landed its Kaguya lunar probe after two years in orbit.

While NASA's lunar orbiter took less than a week to arrive at the moon, a second, smaller probe launched at the same time won't be coming to the moon until October. But when it does, it will, like Japan's probe, arrive with a bang.

The Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) is currently in an elongated orbit around the Earth, building up speed to help propel the probe on a collision course with the moon's south pole in October.

NASA hopes the crash landing will be a spectacular smash-up, sending roughly 350,000 tonnes of debris into the sunlightthat the space agencyhopes tostudy to look for evidence of water ice, and get a better idea of the mineral composition of the moon beneath the surface.