Europe’s first spacecraft to the moon ended its three-year mission on Sunday by crashing into the lunar surface in a volcanic plane called the Lake of Excellence, to a round of applause in the mission control room.
Hitting at 2km per second, or 7 200kph, the impact of the Smart-1 spacecraft was expected to leave a 3m-by-10m crater and send dust kilometres above the surface. Observatories watched the event from Earth and scientists hoped the cloud of dust and debris would provide clues to the geologic composition of the site.
”That’s it — we are in the Lake of Excellence,” said spacecraft operations chief Octavio Camino as applause broke out in mission control in Darmstadt, Germany. ”We have landed.”
Minutes later, officials showed off a picture captured by an observatory in Hawaii displaying a bright flash from the impact.
”It was a great mission and a great success, and now it’s over,” said mission manager Gerhard Schwehm.
The spacecraft ended a three-year mission that scanned the lunar surface from orbit and tested a new, efficient, ion-propulsion system that officials hope to use on future interplanetary missions.
Launched into Earth’s orbit by an Ariane-5 booster rocket from Kourou, French Guiana, in September 2003, Smart-1 used its ion engine to raise its orbit slowly over 14 months until the moon’s gravity grabbed it.
The engine, which uses electricity from the craft’s solar panels to produce a stream of charged particles called ions, generates small amounts of thrust but only needed 80kg of xenon fuel.
The craft’s X-ray and infrared spectrometers have gathered information about the moon’s geology that scientists hope will advance their knowledge about how the moon’s surface evolved and test theories about how the moon came into being.
On Saturday, mission controllers had to raise the craft’s orbit by 600m to avoid hitting a crater rim on final approach. Had the orbit not been raised, the craft would have crashed one orbit too soon, making the impact difficult or impossible to observe.
Smart-1, a cube measuring roughly a metre on each side, took the long way to the moon — more than 100-million kilometres instead of the direct route of 350 000km to 400 000km. The European Space Agency did it for a relatively cheap â,¬110-million.
The spacecraft also took high-resolution pictures of the surface with a miniaturised camera, sending its last images just minutes before the impact. — Sapa-AP