Goals: Lunar Prospector was designed to provide answers to long-standing questions about the Moon, its resources, its structure and its origins.
Accomplishments: For a year and a half its five instruments mapped lunar resources, gravity and magnetic fields, and even outgassing events. After a year and a half of ground-breaking science, Lunar Prospector took a bold step towards furthering its science legacy by intentionally impacting a targeted south polar crater of the Moon, in the hopes that ejecta from the impact could be seen from Earth and analyzed for the existence of water ice.
Lunar Prospector was the first mission to be competitively selected and the third to launch in a series of missions in NASA's Discovery program.
