Welcome, John, and thanks for the comprehensive list!

1. How do the two ends find each other?

2. There are three ground sites - one in California, one in New Mexico, and one in Tenerife; how does it know where to look?

3. The laser operates in the near infra-red. To what extent can it deal with cloud?

To what extent can it deal with slew? Would this mechanism be useful for Earth-orbit-to-ground communications?

No different to radio...

press conf now beginning on NASA TV. at a confortable 8 AM here in Europe (yes, we were mostly sleeping during the launch itself...)

Oh, it's definitely different from radio alright. About 4-5 orders of magnitude different. The far higher frequencies of light mean a far smaller beamwidth than a typical radio link, so they have to use spatial searching algorithms. See this video (cued up to the right moment) for a very brief discussion of this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03BN7_4N0yQ&t=38s

In her LADEE coverage, Emily Lakdawalla states that the Lunar Dust Experiment (LDEX) has heritage from Cassini CAPS (Cassini Plasma Spectrometer). I wonder if that is correct. CAPS measures the energy and electrical charge of particles such as electrons and protons and LDEX is an impact ionization dust detector. Emily probably mixed it up with Cassini's CDA (Cosmic Dust Analyzer).

That thing leapt off the pad like there was something a-comin' after it and it didn't dare to look back...

-the other Doug

A group of us were lucky enough to view the launch, I thought for sure we would not make it off the pad on the first try with such a small window.Tried to video the event however as you said it was so fast off that pad I have about 5 seconds of it then just the sound of the rocket. :-)

http://www.flickr.com/photos/fxmurphy/9705...157635443442680

There's a great display that will autonomously flick between realtime telemetry driven and predicted trajectory

Looks like an old mystery may have been solved: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v522/...ature14479.html

Despite being trace constituents of the lunar exosphere, sodium and potassium are the most readily observed species due to their bright line emission. Measurements of these species by the Ultraviolet and Visible Spectrometer (UVS) on the Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) have revealed unambiguous temporal and spatial variations indicative of a strong role for meteoroid bombardment and surface composition in determining the composition and local time dependence of the Moon’s exosphere. Observations show distinct lunar day (monthly) cycles for both species as well as an annual cycle for sodium. The first continuous measurements for potassium show a more repeatable variation across lunations and an enhancement over KREEP (Potassium Rare Earth Elements and Phosphorus) surface regions, revealing a strong dependence on surface composition.

In H. G. Wells' 1901 science fiction classic The First Men in the Moon, two protagonists, English businessman Mr. Bedford and the eccentric physicist Dr. Cavor, knock back a special enervating concoction designed to expand their lungs, followed by the requisite fortifying brandy, before venturing onto the Moon's surface to breathe the rarefied lunar atmosphere. Even more tenuous than Wells' imagined environment, the lunar exosphere is an atmosphere so thin that atoms never collide, bounded on one side by the lunar surface and extending thousands of kilometers out into space. This low-density envelope results from a balance among the influx of material from the Sun, outgassing from the Moon's interior, delivery from meteoritic bombardment, and the loss of material to space as well as recycling in the lunar surface (see the figure). The precise formula for the formation of the lunar exosphere is unknown, but recent data from orbital spacecraft are being used to delineate the relative contributions from different processes. On page 249 of this issue, Colaprete et al. (1) report measurements of sodium and potassium (Na and K) in the lunar exosphere based on observations from the Ultraviolet and Visible Spectrometer (UVS) aboard NASA's Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE), which acquired continuous dayside and nightside measurements of exospheric Na and K over multiple lunar orbits.