Good morning.
A mostly cloudy Sunday, with a high of seventy-four, awaits.
NASA recently launched a new moon probe, LADEE, and after a technical glitch now resolved, it’s on the way.
….LADEE moon mission, short for Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer, is aimed at studying the moon’s thin atmosphere and solving long-standing mysteries of the moon’s dust.
The atmosphere of the moon, known as an “exosphere,” is so thin that individual molecules don’t interact with each other. Similar environments have been seen on Mercury, the moons of outer planets in the solar system, as well as some asteroids, so scientists are hoping LADEE will help better understand these strange environments.
LADEE scientists also hope the mission will yield insights into the odd “lunar glow” spotted on the moon’s horizon by Apollo astronauts during NASA’s lunar landings in the 1960s and 1970s. The mission will also track how moon dust moves across the lunar surface, which is key interest because the abrasive stuff can stick to spacesuits and clog up systems on future moon vehicles and rovers.
LADEE will take about 30 days to reach the moon and spend 100 days performing its lunar atmosphere and dust mission. The spacecraft will also test a new laser communications system that NASA has billed as a kind of new “interplanetary Internet.”
At the end of its mission, LADEE will plummet down to the moon and crash into the lunar surface.
Here’s the liftoff:
On this day in 1958, a regulation ends:
1958 – Janesville Women Belly Up to the Bar
On this date the Janesville city council voted 4-2 to finally end a paternalistic and discriminatory ordinance that prohibited women from drinking at the bar. Since the end of Prohibition in 1933, women had been banned from being served while standing at the bar in Janesville taverns. [Source: Janesville Gazette]