
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: TUESDAY, January 25, 1994                   TAG: 9401250188
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: By Boston Globe
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

MILITARY HARDWARE TO BEGIN MISSION TO MAP THE MOON

For 25 years, the missile waited in a silo in Arkansas, ready at a moment's notice to deliver its payload of nuclear warheads to a target somewhere in the Soviet Union. Today at 8:30 a.m., its engines will roar to life after all those years and take off, but both its payload and its destination have changed.

The bombs have been replaced with a space probe equipped with cameras and scientific instruments; the new target is the moon. Its mission is to map the lunar surface, and then an asteroid, in unprecedented detail. The sword has become a plowshare.

The Titan IIG rocket, to be launched from Vandenburg Air Force Base in California, is still owned by the military, and its primary mission is still a Defense Department project. It is now part of a test by the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization - the new name for the "Star Wars" program - to determine the feasibility of tracking missiles from an orbit high above the Earth.

But the project's military sponsors decided the spacecraft could also be used for scientific research, and allowed scientists, with the help of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, to "piggyback" a series of research projects on the mission.

The project is called Clementine, because, as in the old ballad, it will eventually be "lost and gone forever." But until then, astronomers and geologists expect it to collect a wealth of information - data they have been trying to get for 20 years.

Eugene Shoemaker, a geologist and planetary specialist who is leading Clementine's science team, said the information about the moon's surface would represent "a big gain - it's a nice step beyond where we were after Apollo" and could help answer fundamental questions about the birth of the planets.

The opportunity is "basically a gift to the scientific community," he said. "It's a mission we just wouldn't have if it weren't for the military mission."

The six lunar landings of the Apollo program provided detailed information about the lunar surface at six places, and three automated Soviet sample-return missions provided rocks and soil from three other spots. But the moon has a highly varied surface, said Shoemaker, an astrogeologist with the U.S. Geological Survey who helped NASA plan the original Apollo landings. We still know relatively little about other parts of it, he said, especially the moon's far side, which is never visible from Earth.

"Imagine that you were a Martian," he said, "and you sent missions to the Earth, landed at six sites and then tried to figure out the geology of the Earth. We really haven't explored the moon in much depth."

What they learn about the moon could have many implications for Earth and other planets. "What's interesting about the moon is it preserves for us a record of those very early events" during the formation of the solar system's planets, moons, asteroids and comets "that are essentially gone on Earth," Shoemaker said.

Because of the thick Earth atmosphere that gives us winds and rain, and the violent activity of earthquakes, volcanos and moving plates of the Earth's crust, the early history of our own planet has been almost completely erased, he said, but "there it is on the moon for us to figure out," preserved on an airless, weatherless surface.

Clementine will not land. It will circle the moon for two months, taking high-resolution pictures of one strip of the lunar surface at a time as the moon slowly revolves below, gradually building up a detailed map of the entire lunar surface.

by CNB