English: NASA RETURNING TO THE MOON WITH FIRST LUNAR LAUNCH IN A DECADE

NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter launched at 5:32 p.m. EDT Thursday aboard an Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. The satellite will relay more information about the lunar environment than any other previous mission to the moon. The orbiter, known as LRO, separated from the Atlas V rocket carrying it and a companion mission, the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, or LCROSS, and immediately began powering up the components necessary to control the spacecraft. The flight operations team established communication with LRO and commanded the successful deployment of the solar array at 7:40 p.m. The operations team continues to check out the spacecraft subsystems and prepare for the first mid-course correction maneuver. NASA scientists expect to establish communications with LCROSS about four hours after launch, at approximately 9:30 p.m.

KSC-2009-3778 (06/18/2009) --- CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – Smoke pours across Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida as the Atlas V/Centaur carrying NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, or LRO, and NASA's Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, known as LCROSS, roars into the sky. The towers around the pad are part of the lightning protection system. LRO and LCROSS are the first missions in NASA's plan to return humans to the moon and begin establishing a lunar outpost by 2020. The LRO also includes seven instruments that will help NASA characterize the moon's surface: DIVINER, LAMP, LEND, LOLA , CRATER, Mini-RF and LROC. Launch was on-time at 5:32 p.m. EDT. Photo credit: NASA/Tom Farrar, Kevin O'Connel