KSC-2009-1743

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – At the Astrotech payload processing facility near NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, a crane gets ready to lift the shipping cage from around NASA's Lunar CRater Observation and Sensing Satellite, known as LCROSS. The satellite's primary mission is to search for water ice on the moon in a permanently shadowed crater near one of the lunar poles. LCROSS is a low-cost, accelerated-development, companion mission to NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, or LRO. At Kennedy, the two spacecraft will be integrated with an Atlas V launch vehicle and tested for final flight worthiness. LCROSS and LRO are the first missions in NASA's plan to return humans to the moon and begin establishing a lunar outpost by 2020. Launch is no earlier than April 24. Photo credit: NASA/Tim Jacobs