by Kelly Sheridan, Agence France-Presse Posted on 09/06/2013 10:08 AM |Updated 09/06/2013 11:41 AM

NASA'S LADEE. NASA's Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer hopes to bring us more information on the moon. Screen shot from YouTube video

WASHINGTON, USA (UPDATED) - NASA hopes to unravel more of the Moon's mysteries Friday by launching an unmanned mission to study its atmosphere, the US space agency's third such probe in five years.

The Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) is to launch Friday at 11:27 pm (Saturday 3:27 am GMT) aboard a Minotaur V rocket - a converted peacekeeping missile - from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia.

Since US astronauts last walked on the moon four decades ago, rocket scientists have learned that there is more to the Moon than just a dusty, desolate terrain.

Recent NASA robotic missions such as the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter have returned troves of images detailing the Moon's cratered surface, while NASA's Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) revealed how being pummelled by asteroids resulted in the Moon's uneven patches of gravity.

A previous NASA satellite, the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite(LCROSS) discovered water ice when it impacted in 2009, the space agency said.

"When we left the Moon we thought of it as an atmosphere-less ancient surface," said John Grunsfeld, associate administrator for NASA's science mission directorate.

"We have discovered that the Moon scientifically is very much alive, it is still evolving and in fact has a kind of atmosphere."

The Moon's atmosphere is so thin that its molecules do not collide, in what is known as an exosphere.

Excerpt from:

NASA spacecraft to study Moon's atmosphere