NASA's New Moon Probe Enters Lunar Orbit

NASA's newest lunar probe is officially orbiting the moon.

After a month-long journey, the Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) spacecraft — designed to probe the moon's thin atmosphere and lunar dust — performed an engine burn on Sunday that took it into orbit around the moon.

While the current U.Sgovernment shutdown has all but halted work at NASA, operations for the $280 million mission are not affected because LADEE is in a critical phase, Rachel Hoover, a spokeswoman at NASA's Ames Research Center in California, told Spaceflight Now before the shutdown. NASA's federal shutdown plan has furloughed most of the agency's 18,000 employees, but does allow the agency to watch over spacecraft in flight like LADEE and the International Space Station Read more...