Clementine in retrospect

Clementine was a joint U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) and National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) mission launched in January 1994. Its primary purpose was to test space hardware developed for the DoD. Its secondary goal was to collect data of scientific value for NASA by imaging the Moon in multiple, narrow visible and infrared passbands from lunar orbit and the asteroid 1620 Geographos during a close fly by. The images of Geographos were not obtained, but the lunar data provided by Clementine far exceeded everyone´s expectations in both quality and quantity. Some reasons why Clementine could be considered faster, better, and cheaper are inherent to the Naval Center for Space Technology (NCST), the space technology group at the Naval Research Laboratory. The major innovation of this type was the close teamwork established, by design, between the NASA Science Team and the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) operations team. The high quality and utility of the lunar data are a direct result of the good working relationship between these two groups-which really became a single group. This cooperation allowed the Clementine team to go from recognition after several weeks in lunar orbit that some craters in the Moon´s south polar region could be in permanent shade to conducting several days later the bistatic radar probing of the Moon´s polar regions which resulted in data showing that water could be present on the Moon