Initial Observations of the Moon by LRO’s Lyman Alpha Mapping Project (LAMP) Instrument (Invited)

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[5464] Planetary Sciences: Solid Surface Planets / Remote Sensing, [5470] Planetary Sciences: Solid Surface Planets / Surface Materials And Properties, [6250] Planetary Sciences: Solar System Objects / Moon

Scientific paper

The Lyman Alpha Mapping Project (LAMP) is a far-ultraviolet (FUV) imaging spectrograph on NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) mission. Its main objectives are to (i) identify and localize exposed water frost (and possibly other volatiles) in permanently shadowed regions (PSRs), (ii) characterize landforms and albedos in PSRs, (iii) demonstrate the feasibility of using natural starlight and skyglow illumination for future lunar surface mission applications, and (iv) characterize the lunar atmosphere and its variability (including transients resulting from the LCROSS impact). As a byproduct, LAMP will map a large fraction of the Moon at FUV wavelengths, allowing new studies of the microphysical and reflectance properties of the regolith. The LAMP FUV spectrograph will accomplish these objectives by measuring the signal reflected from the nightside lunar surface and in PSRs using both the interplanetary HI Lyman-α skyglow and FUV starlight as light sources. Both these light sources provide fairly uniform, but faint, illumination. With the expected LAMP sensitivity, by the end of the primary 1-year LRO mission, the SNR for a Lyman-α albedo map will be >100 in polar regions >1 km2, allowing the FUV characterization of subtle compositional and structural features. Routine dayside observations of reflected FUV sunlight will also be made, using a pinhole in the aperture door. The LAMP instrument is based on the Alice spectrographs flying on the Rosetta comet mission and the New Horizons Pluto mission. A general description of the LAMP instrument and its initial results are presented here.

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