Scientists confirm helpful Moon mineral

NASA officials said the work lays the scientific foundation for robotic prospecting missions — an orbiter due for launch in 2008 and one or more landers later on. All are designed to help the National Aeronautics and Space Administration plan for manned landings as early as 2018.

James B. Garvin, chief scientist at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, called the mission, carried out during August’s full moon, “one of the technically most-challenging observations Hubble has ever done”.

It was also the first use of the 15-year-old observatory to support the Bush administration’s plans to send astronauts back to the moon and eventually on to Mars.

The Hubble project’s goal, Garvin said, was to “provide near-term information to help us make key decisions” about lunar exploration — such as where to land and whether explorers can eventually expect to be self-sustaining.

But it will also provide scientists with new knowledge of lunar geology and history.

Mattias Mountain, the new director of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, called the project “a wonderful synergy between science and exploration.”

“What NASA is trying to do is understand this balance between science and exploration, and I think maintaining the appropriate balance is going to be the trick,” he said.

But Hubble’s success with the lunar observations does not guarantee its future. NASA officials say the observatory’s life expectancy in orbit will still depend on approval of a servicing mission to replace aging gyroscopes and batteries.

NASA administrator Michael Griffin has said he will not schedule a Hubble servicing mission until at least two shuttle flights have returned safely to Earth.

The shuttle Discovery returned safely in August from the first flight since the Columbia disaster in 2003. But falling debris during its launch postponed the next flight until at least May or June.

“Hubble is working great right now, and in fact, we are doing everything we can to keep Hubble operating as long as possible and as productively as possible,” added Jennifer Wiseman, a Hubble program scientist at NASA headquarters.

“I don’t think that these observations will have any impact, one way or the other, on the future of Hubble,” she added. But they do illustrate Hubble’s versatility.

The idea of using Hubble for lunar mineralogy first surfaced in 1991, just a year after its launch.

Garvin said the telescope’s capacity to gather ultraviolet light is impossible to duplicate from beneath the Earth’s atmosphere. It offered a unique opportunity to use reflected light to remotely map minerals on the moon’s surface and learn something about its natural history.

NASA turned down Garvin’s idea repeatedly over the years. But he resurrected it in 2004, when then-NASA adminstrator Sean O’Keefe challenged scientists to find clever new ways to use existing data and hardware to support the manned exploration initiative.

With scientists and engineers from Goddard, the Space Telescope Science Institute and academia, Garvin submitted the proposal again. This time it survived scientific scrutiny and an independent review to assure it would not threaten Hubble’s health and safety.

To their amazement, it all worked. Hubble safely made 60 brief exposures, snapped over three days during 12 orbits of the Earth.