NASA launches spacecraft to study Moon

NASA has launched its third lunar probe in five years with an unmanned spacecraft that aims to study the Moon's atmosphere.

Blazing a red path in the night sky, the spacecraft lifted off from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia at 11.27pm local time Friday (1327 AEST Saturday) aboard a converted Air Force ballistic missile known as the Minotaur V rocket.

"The spacecraft is in good health and a good orbit at this point," said NASA commentator George Diller about half an hour after the launch.

The Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) aims to learn more about the atmosphere and dust while circling the Moon.

When US astronauts last walked on the Moon four decades ago, they learned that dust could be a huge problem for sensitive spacecraft and equipment, said space expert John Logsdon.

"If we were ever to go there with people for long duration, the dust gets in everything. It's not smooth dust like a piece of sand on the beach. It's made of very, very small fragments," said Logsdon, a NASA adviser and former director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University.

"All the Apollo crews complained about the lunar dust getting everywhere."

US astronauts first walked on the Moon in 1969, and the last explorers of the Apollo era visited in 1972.

The journey to the Moon will take about a month and the probe will initially orbit at a height of about 250km for 40 days before moving lower for the science portion of its mission.

After 100 days spent measuring chemical variations in the lunar atmosphere, analysing exosphere gasses and lunar dust grains and looking for water molecules in the lunar atmosphere, the LADEE spacecraft will make a death plunge into the Moon's surface.

Potential future uses of this module could include unmanned probes to an asteroid or to Mars, as well as future Moon probes, though none are planned for now.

NASA's next big human exploration project aims to send humans to Mars by the 2030s.