Centaur Rocket

A powerful robotic lunar scout, NASA's first in more than a decade, arrived at the moon early Tuesday on a mission to seek out potential landing sites and hidden water ice for future astronauts.NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) fired its thrusters at 5:47 a.m. EDT (0947 GMT) in a 40-minute maneuver to begin orbiting the moon . It is NASA's first unmanned moon shot since 1998."We are in lunar orbit," said LRO project scientist Richard Vondrak at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "We're not going past the moon. We're there to stay."About the size of a Mini Cooper car, the $504 million LRO probe launched toward the moon on June 18 and spent four days in transit - about a day longer than astronauts on the Apollo missions in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The robotic probe is expected to spent at least one year mapping the moon for future manned missions, as well as several more years conducting science surveys."LRO has returned NASA to the moon," a flight contro...

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