Impact! Lunar orbiter captures Ebb and Flow crash sites

Last year, on December 17th, two NASA spacecraft crashed into the surface of the Moon. They were named GRAIL-A (Ebb) and GRAIL-B (Flow), and the crash was carefully planned out as the ending of their two-year mission to map the gravity of the Moon.

Each spacecraft was about the size and shape of washing machine. When they slammed into the side of a lunar mountain, the project scientists hoped that the dust and gases kicked up by the impacts would give them more insight into the Moon's composition, and how the movement of the dust is affected by the tenuous lunar atmosphere.

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To get help for this last phase of the mission, they contacted the science team in charge of the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), and asked them to take before and after pictures of the crash site.

The results from the LRO were just released today:

The after images (bottom) clearly show the spray of material from the impact sites.

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"Both craters are relatively small, perhaps 4 to 6 metres in diameter and both have faint, dark, ejecta patterns, which is unusual," said Mark Robinson, the principal investigator for the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera, at Arizona State University's School of Earth and Space Sciences. "Fresh impact craters on the moon are typically bright, but these may be dark due to spacecraft material being mixed with the ejecta."

Scientists will now take the time to examine the crash pictures, to see what they can find out, but in the mean time, the GRAIL and LRO missions' combined data are producing some very detailed topographical maps of the Moon.

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