Lunar Prospector was launched from Cape Canaveral on January 6, 1998 and collected orbital mapping data on the entire Moon from January 11, 1998 through July 31, 1999, when mission director and principal investigator, Dr. Alan Binder, commanded the nearly spent spacecraft to impact in a south polar crater as the final experiment of this spectacularly successful program.

The Lunar Prospector mission was defined, designed and carried out under the direction of Dr. Binder, the founder and director of the Lunar Research Institute.

The mission, one of 28 proposed to NASA, was selected in February 1995 as the first peer reviewed and competitively selected mission in NASA's new Discovery Program of low-cost exploration missions of the solar system.

The cost of the entire Lunar Prospector program, including an extended mission of low altitude mapping, was just $65 million or about 25% of that of other Discovery missions and only a few percent of that of a more typical NASA exploratory mission.

During its 19 month mission, Lunar Prospector provided the world with its first complete data sets on the composition, magnetism and gravity of the Moon, as well as data on its gas release activity.

According to Binder "The data produced by Lunar Prospector are about ten times better than we had promised NASA and represent a significant advancement in our exploration of the Moon and its resources.

Some of our initial findings are that water ice exists near the lunar poles, the Moon has a small iron core and the strongest lunar magnetic fields were formed as a result of giant impacts which occurred about 4 billion years ago".

In addition to mapping the Moon and its resources, Binder stated that "Lunar Prospector's real impact on space exploration was showing that excellent science data can be obtained by simple, inexpensive spacecraft � a fact which has opened the door to the commercial exploration of the Moon for the benefit of humanity."

The two-year data analysis program will be done under the direction of Dr. Binder with subcontracts from the Lunar Research Institute to the members of the Lunar Prospector Science Team who provided the scientific instruments for the mission and helped conduct it.

The co-investigators are: Dr. Mario Acuna of the Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland; Dr. William Feldman of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, New Mexico; Dr. Lon Hood of the University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona and Dr. Robert Lin of the University of California, Berkeley.

The results of the data analysis program will be global maps of the Moon's surface composition, magnetic fields and polar water ice deposits, maps which will be available to the public and the lunar science community for further study and interpretation.

The analyzed data and maps will provide a wealth of new information on the origin, evolution and resources of the Moon. The lunar resource information is key for the next step of the colonization of the Moon and humanities expansion into the rest of the solar system.

The Lunar Research Institute, established in 1996, is a private, non-profit corporation dedicated to the exploration of the Moon, supported by contracts, grants and charitable contributions from the public.

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