NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. invites reporters to participate in a special media day that will highlight NASA’s upcoming Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) mission. LRO Media Day will be held on Thursday, June 12, 2008 from 9:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. EDT.
Media Day will provide reporters with an opportunity to learn more about this upcoming mission. A panel briefing will begin at 10 a.m. The briefing will be followed by a question and answer session with the panelists. Opportunities for one on one interviews with panel members will be provided following the Q&A session. Following the briefing, reporters will be taken to Goddard’s Integration and Test Facilities to view the LRO cleanroom where media will be briefed on activities going on inside the cleanroom. The final tour stop will be the LRO Mission Operations Center where LRO data will be received and processed from the spacecraft.
Reporters interested in attending should contact Nancy Neal Jones at 301-286-0039, or at nancy.n.jones@nasa.gov by June 9 to reserve a space and provide names for security badges. Foreign nationals must RSVP by June 5 to allow for proper clearance. Reporters should meet at the Goddard Visitor’s Center, located off Greenbelt Road (State Route 193) and ICESat Road no later than 9:15 a.m. EDT to allow sufficient time for everyone to receive badges. A shuttle will take reporters to the various sites.
LRO will create a comprehensive atlas of the moon’s features and resources that will be needed as NASA designs and builds a planned lunar outpost. LRO focuses on the selection of safe landing sites, identification of lunar resources, and studies of how the lunar radiation environment will affect humans. The mission will support future human exploration while providing a foundation for upcoming science missions. LRO is scheduled for launch in late 2008.
The spacecraft is being built and managed by Goddard for the Exploration Systems Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. It will transition to the Science Mission Directorate in 2010.
More information about LRO can be found at:
