Transcripts of lro_lamp_ipod_lg

[music] [music] [music] [music] [music] [music] Randy Gladstone: In the night sky, there's a...a sort of a glow throughout the sky that is shining down on even the night side of the Moon. You get diffuse lighting from all around the sky, and we're looking at the reflection from that source of light. LAMP stands for Lyman-Alpha Mapping Project. It's an experiment that looks in the ultraviolet --at the reflected light from the Moon's surface to determine composition and whether frost is there. Kurt Retherford: So LAMP is neat because we're gonna look at the lunar nightside as well as the lunar dayside. We're sensitive enough to look at reflected starlight from the surface of the Moon, and also the specific wavelength from hydrogen atoms that are sort of shining throughout the solar system. [silence] Dana Hurley: A spectrograph is a type of instrument that breaks up light into its rainbow, so what LAMP does is it breaks up the ultraviolet part of the rainbow up into the different ultraviolet colors--and it's telling us about what the Moon is made out of. So LAMP is going to see some things that we haven't seen before because we haven't extensively studied this part of the spectrum on the Moon. Randy Gladstone: LAMP is able to see in the dark because because at ultraviolet wavelengths--which are more energetic photons than we look at with our eyes--there's this Lyman-Alpha glow that shines on it from all over the place. Kurt Retherford: An instrument quite like ours has never been to the Moon, and it's a new generation of instruments and we're gonna do a bang-up job of measuring the uliraviolet light coming from the Moon. [music] [music] [silence] [beeping] [beeping, silence] [silence] [silence]