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Physical Chemistry

Lunar Probe Goes Out With A Bang

European Space Agency completes moon mission as craft crashes into lunar surface

by Susan R. Morrissey
September 11, 2006 | A version of this story appeared in Volume 84, Issue 37

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Credit: ESA/SPACE-X (Space Exploration Institute)
This image of the lunar surface is one of nearly 20,000 images returned by SMART-1 before it crashed.
Credit: ESA/SPACE-X (Space Exploration Institute)
This image of the lunar surface is one of nearly 20,000 images returned by SMART-1 before it crashed.

The European Space Agency (ESA) celebrated the completion of its first mission to the moon on Sept. 3 when the spacecraft SMART-1 made its planned impact on the lunar surface. The 36-month, $141 million project demonstrated key technologies that the agency will use in future scientific expeditions.

Among the technologies tested on the first Small Missions for Advanced Research in Technology (SMART) mission was a solar-electric propulsion system. Its ion engine uses electricity from solar panels to generate a beam of charged particles, which push the spacecraft forward. This demonstration of ion propulsion is a first for ESA.

SMART-1 also contained a number of miniaturized instruments to study the formation and evolution of the moon, including a D-CIXS (demonstration of a compact imaging X-ray spectrometer) instrument to study the lunar surface's composition. D-CIXS detects the solar X-rays reflected by the moon. The energy of those X-rays is a function of the abundance of a particular element.

The scientists are still sifting through the data from D-CIXS (the instrument continued to send data until two seconds before impact); the analyses to date find evidence of magnesium, aluminum, silicon, iron, and calcium, which is consistent with the analysis of moon samples returned by the Soviet Luna program. This result, however, does mark the first time that calcium has been detected remotely on the moon. A similar instrument will fly on India's first lunar mission, Chandrayaan-1, scheduled to launch next year.

"SMART-1 data have opened a new era in remote-sensing investigation of Earth's nearest neighbor," said Manuel Grande, D-CIXS principal investigator. "A great deal is still to be learned from analysis of these data," he added.

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