The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) is the first mission in NASA’s Vision for Space Exploration, a plan to return to the moon and then to travel to Mars and beyond. LRO will launch in late 2008 with the objectives to finding safe landing sites, locate potential resources, characterize the radiation environment, and demonstrate new technology. The spacecraft will be placed in low polar orbit (50 km) for a 1-year mission under NASA’s Exploration Systems Mission Directorate. LRO will return global data, such as day night temperature maps, a global geodetic grid, high resolution color imaging and the moon’s UV albedo. However there is particular emphasis on the polar regions of the moon where continuous access to solar illumination may be possible and the prospect of water in the permanently shadowed regions at the poles may exist. Although the objectives of LRO are explorative in nature, the payload includes instruments with considerable heritage from previous planetary science missions, enabling transition to a science phase under NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. Here, we will introduce each of the instruments and give an overview of their objectives. The spacecraft and mission design is discussed in a companion paper presented at this conference. [img]https://cdn.astrobin.com/ckeditor-files/208988/2024/20e51944-709a-417a-8fb3-4513c077f54f.jpeg[/img] [img]https://cdn.astrobin.com/ckeditor-files/208988/2024/97d45a4c-c27b-4a3a-be82-b9ae5761cdc3.png[/img] LROC has high heritage from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) Context Camera (CTX) and Mars Color Imager (MARCI) instruments [8], with modifications needed to meet the primary measurement requirements. Each NAC has a 700 mm-focallength, Ritchey-Chretien telescope that images onto a 5000-pixel CCD line-array, providing a cross-track field-of-view (FOV) of 2.86°. WAC has two short-focal-length lenses imaging onto the same 1000 x 1000 pixel, electronically shuttered CCD areaarray, one imaging in the visible/near Infrared (EFL=6.0mm), and the other in the UV (EFL=4.5mm). The optical systems have a cross-track FOV of 90° and 60° respectively. From the nominal 50 km orbit, the WAC will provide a nadir, ground sample distance of 100 m/pixel in the visible, and a swath width of ~100 km. The seven-band color capability of the WAC is provided by a color filter array mounted directly over the detector, providing different sections of the CCD with different filters acquiring data in the seven channels in a “pushframe” mode. [img]https://cdn.astrobin.com/ckeditor-files/208988/2024/1353f0cf-dc4b-4d35-8323-5b4c736d0f8c.png[/img] [img]https://cdn.astrobin.com/ckeditor-files/208988/2024/79d9cfe4-9f9a-4afb-bb63-e7e360f84bed.png[/img] [img]https://cdn.astrobin.com/ckeditor-files/208988/2024/f2767f28-41d1-4bfe-b24f-4cb829b6bb1a.jpeg[/img] Sources:  - [url]https://science.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/keller-lro-hyderabad-paper.pdf[/url] - [url]https://www.eoportal.org/satellite-missions/lro#spacecraft[/url]