The official names of the two twin spacecraft that make up the GRAIL (Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory) mission are Ebb and Flow. Among the many proposals, the selected names were proposed by fourth grader from the Emily Dickinson School in Bozeman, Montana.

In October 2011, NASA started a competition among U.S.A. schools to find the names of the GRAIL spacecraft, so far simply called GRAIL-A and GRAIL-B. It’s a way to raise awareness about this space mission with the hope that American students take an interest in NASA activities and decide to pursue a career in scientific and technological fields.

The English terms “ebb” and “flow” generally refer to the movement of water, particularly in relation to terrestrial tides are influenced by the lunar gravity. The GRAIL spacecrafts will work with extreme precision measuring the variation of their distance again caused by the lunar gravity, therefore the terms “ebb” and “flow” are also appropriate to describe their movements as they study the Moon.

The winning students did a research on the GRAIL mission and the names they proposed for the two spacecraft are inspired by that. It’s for this reason that eventually of the many proposals offered by a total of eleven thousand students in nine hundred classrooms the names Ebb and Flow were selected.

This competition has certainly generated much interest among American students but their participation in the mission isn’t over. In fact, the prize for the winners is the first choice of the area of the Moon to be photographed with the GRAIL MoonKAM (Moon Knowledge Acquired by Middle school students), cameras mounted on two spacecraft precisely in order to obtain images in areas selected by students from various American schools.

Ebb and Flow entered lunar orbit earlier this year and now are making the maneuvers needed to make their orbits nearly circular with an orbital period of almost 2 hours at a height of about 55 km (34 miles) from the surface of the Moon.

The start of the gravitional mapping of the Moon by Ebb and Flow is scheduled for March and at that point the two spacecrafts will also start taking pictures with the GRAIL MoonKAM. Therefore we can hope that this mission will be a scientific success but also a success in involving those who are going to be the scientists and engineers of the future.