Spacecraft To Fly Through Shadow Of The Supermoon Lunar Eclipse In Daring Mission

As we prepare for the supermoon lunar eclipse on Sunday, a team of NASA scientists is readying a moon-observing orbiter for a daring mission — it’ll fly through its shadow.

This is daring because the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter needs sunlight to operate, and spending a lengthy time in shadow could make the expensive piece of equipment shut down, or damage some of its instruments.

NASA told the BBC that the LRO will be out of the sun for about three hours and have to endure an extreme drop in temperature. According to Discovery, the change is like jumping out of a hot tub into icy water.

“There are two things that happen during the eclipse; it gets very cold and there’s no sun to charge the batteries … (W)hen we go into (it) we are very cautious with the spacecraft.”

The LRO has been through a few of these events in the past. According to The International Business Times, it’s been studying the moon’s surface since 2009 and has endured three eclipses in 18 months. It has come out of each unharmed.

Still, it wasn’t designed to spend long periods of time in the cold and dark.

Despite mild concern, NASA is moving forward with a special mission that will take place during the supermoon eclipse using the “Diviner,” or Diviner Lunar Radiometer Experiment.

In the past, LRO has simply viewed the moon’s day-night line, a spot that is always pretty cool. This time around, the spacecraft will spend the eclipse at a spot on the surface that feels more like Earth at 9 a.m. There, NASA will get a better idea of how much the temperature changes during an eclipse; they won’t get another chance to do this until the next one in 2018.

Researchers have already witnessed extreme drops in tempurature — of several hundred degrees — in the upper two centimeters of soil. This layer acts as an insulator; deeper down, lunar soil stays fairly warm. Each time an eclipse comes along, scientists learn more and more about the lunar surface.

For this highly-anticipated supermoon eclipse, they’ll be taking a look at a couple different areas, said the Diviner’s deputy principal investigator Benjamin Greenhagen.

“We’ll look at two large pyroclastic deposits — these are massive volcanic eruptions, with lots of volcanic glass and small particles. We’ll also go over an area with small rocks … (and) try to characterize the rocks.”

Afterward, they’ll examine the data from several events to paint a picture of how lunar soil behaves.

[Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images]