
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- NASA's Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory, or GRAIL, spacecraft is offloaded from an Air Force C-17 cargo plane on the Shuttle Landing Facility at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The spacecraft traveled from the Lockheed Martin plant in Denver, Colo., and will undergo further processing in the Astrotech payload processing facility in Titusville, Fla. The United Launch Alliance Delta II rocket that will carry GRAIL into lunar orbit already is fully stacked at NASA's Space Launch Complex 17B and launch is scheduled for Sept. 8. The GRAIL mission is a part of NASA's Discovery Program. GRAIL will fly twin spacecraft in tandem orbits around the moon for several months to measure its gravity field. The mission also will answer longstanding questions about Earth's moon and provide scientists a better understanding of how Earth and other rocky planets in the solar system formed. For more information, visit http://science.nasa.gov/missions/grail/. Photo credit: NASA/Dimitri Gerondidakis
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NASA ID
KSC-2011-3905
Date Created
May 20, 2011
Center
KSC
Media Type
image
Location
Kennedy Space Center, FL
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