NASA LADEE Spacecraft Wins 2014 Popular Mechanics Breakthrough Award

NASA’s most recent mission, launched in 2013, to explore the moon in greater detail recently won acclaim for its innovative approach. The Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) mission was awarded the 10th annual Popular Mechanics Breakthrough Award for innovation in science and technology.

Among the innovations cited in the 2014 award from Popular Mechanics, were LADEE’s modular flexible construction and laser data transfer capability. Using this method of data transfer, LADEE can send and receive data more than six times faster than the quickest of space-based radio signals.



“We’re proud of the LADEE mission’s accomplishments and this recognition,” said S. Pete Worden, director of NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, which designed, developed, built, integrated, tested and controlled the spacecraft. “LADEE may have been the first Ames-built spacecraft, but after the Kepler mission’s win in 2009 and the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) mission’s win in 2010, it’s the third Ames mission to be honored with this award.”

On its mission LADEE gathered detailed information on the structure and composition of our moon’s thin atmosphere. The goal was to determine whether dust is being lofted into the lunar sky.

The highlighted Lunar Laser Communication Demonstration (LLCD) terminal within the car-sized spacecraft, which demonstrated record-breaking upload and download speeds, was part of a cooperative mission with a team from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory. The platform has revealed the possibility of expanding broadband capabilities in future space communications development.

The design team at Ames constructed LADEE using a Modular Common Spacecraft Bus architecture. This design resulted in a lightweight carbon composite weighing 547.2 pounds unfueled and 844.4 pounds when fully fueled.

“This mission put the innovative common bus design to the test and proved the spacecraft could perform well beyond our most conservative estimates,” said Butler Hine, LADEE project manager at Ames. “This same common bus can be used on future missions to explore other destinations, including voyages to orbit and land on the moon, low-Earth orbit, near-Earth objects and objects in deep space.”

LADEE came to an end when the spacecraft was purposefully commanded to crash into the surface of the moon on April 18th after 100 days of data collection.

“From beginning to end, LADEE was a testament of unparalleled teamwork and unique innovation,” said Joan Salute, LADEE program executive at NASA Headquarters in Washington.” The mission established a new technology paradigm, opening a new chapter for spacecraft design and construction.”