NASA's LADEE Rocket Mission To Launch September 6 33
An anonymous reader writes "NASA's Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) will orbit Earth for three weeks before heading to the moon for a 100-day trip where it will measure lunar dust and the moon's atmosphere. from the article: 'A $6 million University of Colorado Boulder instrument designed to study the behavior of lunar dust will be riding on a NASA mission to the moon now slated for launch on Friday, Sept. 6, from the agency's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. The mission, known as the Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer, or LADEE, will orbit the moon to better understand its tenuous atmosphere and whether dust particles are being lofted high off its surface. The $280 million LADEE mission, designed, developed, integrated and tested at NASA's AMES Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., will take about a month to reach the moon and another month to enter the proper elliptical orbit and to commission the instruments. A 100-day science effort will follow.'"
Re:Because... (Score:4, Insightful)
Its a better use than $34 Million for a never used building in Afghanistan, over $1 billion on a DOD/VA health database that has been effectively scrapped, $66 billion on 187 fighter aircraft not likely to ever find a role in todays military.... I could go on but you get the idea.