A rocket built from decommissioned nuclear missile parts lifted off from Wallops Island, Virginia, carrying a robotic probe to orbit the moon. The Minotaur V’s first stage was a Peacekeeper ICBM booster. Its payload was NASA’s Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer, or LADEE, a mission conceived to investigate a persistent Apollo-era anomaly: strange pre-sunrise glows astronauts reported seeing at the lunar horizon.
LADEE’s 100-day science mission aimed to characterize the moon’s ultra-tenuous exosphere and the role of levitating dust. Scientists hypothesized that electrostatic forces could loft fine particles, creating a diffuse, permanent dust cloud. The spacecraft carried an ultraviolet spectrometer, a neutral mass spectrometer, and a lunar dust experiment. It entered lunar orbit on October 6, 2013.
The mission’s design was an exercise in frugal ingenuity. The Minotaur V itself was operated by Orbital Sciences Corporation, part of a U.S. government program that converts retired strategic missiles into space-launch vehicles. LADEE, built on a modular common spacecraft bus, cost approximately $280 million—a modest sum for a deep-space mission. It communicated with Earth using a novel laser communications system, demonstrating data transmission rates far exceeding traditional radio.
LADEE found a permanent, asymmetric cloud of dust enveloping the moon, fed by regular impacts of high-speed interplanetary dust particles. It detected trace gases like neon-20 and argon-40 in the exosphere. The probe’s end was deliberate; on April 18, 2014, it was commanded to impact the lunar far side, its final telemetry confirming a direct hit on the eastern rim of the Sundman V crater. The mission provided the first global data on the moon’s dynamic surface-boundary environment, a necessary baseline for understanding the conditions future lunar outposts will face.