🛰️ Mission
Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter
Has been mapping the Moon, metre by metre, since 2009.
- Launched
- 18 June 2009, 17 years ago
- Working for
- 17 years so far
- Built by
- NASA
- Sees
- Ordinary light, Infrared light
- Where it is
- Circling the Moon, low over the poles
- Best known for
- The map everything now uses: it found water ice in craters that never see the Sun, and can photograph the Apollo landers from orbit
Did you know?
- Its pictures are sharp enough to show the Apollo landers, their tracks, and the flags still standing.
- The floors of some polar craters have not seen sunlight in two billion years and sit at about −240 °C, which is how the ice survives.
Where it went
The Moon
Earth’s only natural moon, and the only other world people have walked on.
More NASA photos of Lunar Reconnaissance OrbiterStraight from NASA’s image library, in the app
Explore more
All of missions
Hubble Space Telescope
Thirty-six years above the weather, and still working.
James Webb Space Telescope
A golden mirror that sees the first galaxies in infrared.
Chandra X-ray Observatory
The telescope that shows what is hot and violent.
Spitzer Space Telescope
Sixteen years of infrared, through dust that hides everything else.
Kepler
Stared at one patch of sky and found thousands of planets.
TESS
Kepler’s successor, watching the whole sky for planets.