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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, the impact of the Smart-1 spacecraft was expected to leave a 3m-by-10m crater.

The European probe Huygens descended towards the Saturn moon Titan on Friday, culminating a seven-year quest covering 2,1-billion kilometres to explore one of the greatest enigmas of the solar system. Mission controllers shouted for joy when Huygens sent a radio signal, proving it had survived the entry.

At speeds reaching 50 000kph, even the smallest bits of space debris, such as flakes of paint, can cause serious harm to spacecraft. At the end of 2003, there were about 10 000 catalogued objects in orbit around Earth. There are many thousands more uncatalogued objects larger than 1cm, perhaps more than 500 000.