Imagine trekking in a lunar rover across miles of the Moon's rough
surface. Your mission: to explore a crater with suspected
deposits of ice. In every direction, the gray terrain looks more or less the same. Wouldn't want to get lost in this place! you think to yourself. You arrive where the rover's digital map says the crater should be ... but it's not there! In a flash, you realize that your map is wrong. The crater's true position must be slightly different. But how different? A kilometer? Ten kilometers? In which direction? Mission aborted. The story is fiction, but it raises a real-life issue: the need for accurate maps of the Moon's terrain According to NASA's Vision for Space Exploration,
astronauts will return to the Moon as early as 2015. This is a key step en route to Mars and beyond. On the Moon, which is practically in Earth's backyard, astronauts can learn how to live on an alien world before attempting longer voyages to other planets. However, our current maps of the Moon are not very precise. In some areas, near Apollo landing sites, for instance, the locations of craters and ridges are well known. They were extensively photographed by lunar orbiters and Apollo astronauts. But much of the lunar
surface is known only approximately. "If you ask 'where is a crater on the far side of the Moon?', chances are there's probably many kilometers of uncertainty in its true positioning," says David Smith, a scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. Even on the near side of the Moon, Smith adds, errors in the true global position of features may be as large as a kilometer. To improve this situation, NASA plans to send a high-precision laser altimeter to orbit the Moon and create a 3-dimensional map of its surface. When completed, the map will be so accurate that we'll know the contours of the Moon better than we do some remote regions on Earth. Astronauts will be able to use it like a USGS hiking map. The laser is named "LOLA," short for Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter. It's scheduled to launch in 2008 onboard the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft. LOLA works by bouncing pulses of laser light off the lunar surface as it orbits the Moon. By measuring the time it takes for light to travel to the surface and back, LOLA can calculate the roundtrip distance. LOLA is capable of timing pulses with a precision of 0.6 nanoseconds, corresponding to a distance error of no more than 10 cm.Write your abstract here.