The first pictures of the Moon taken by the GRAIL spacecraft

The crater De Forest on the Moon with the Earth in the background (Image NASA/Caltech-JPL/MIT/SRS)
The crater De Forest on the Moon with the Earth in the background (Image NASA/Caltech-JPL/MIT/SRS)

NASA started publishing photos of the Moon taken by the MoonKam (Moon Knowledge Acquired by Middle school students) of Ebb and Flow, the GRAIL (Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory) spacecraft. To be precise, between March 15 and 17, Ebb took pictures of the area selected by the fourth grade students from the Emily Dickinson Elementary School, Bozeman, Montana, who won the contest to name the two spacecraft.

Earlier this month, Ebb and Flow started their primary mission, which is to carry out very precise measurements of the Moon’s gravity to understand its formation. The small variations in the Moon’s gravity will allow scientists to get a better idea of ​​what materials it’s made and their distribution. Obviously, the analysis of data collected by the GRAIL spacecrafts will take into account the presence of mountains, craters and other gradients.

With the first pictures taken by MoonKam, the second mission of Ebb and Flow started: to engage students by allowing them to choose which areas to take pictures of. The GRAIL spacecraft send the images they took to Earth, where they are put online on a dedicated website. Each album thus created is identified by the name of the school who requested those photographs.

The pictures quality isn’t extraordinary. We got used to astronomical images of galaxies distant even billions of light years that are really extraordinary but they, after being captured by the various telescopes, are processed in various ways. The pictures taken by the probe Ebb seem to have been published as they were captured by the MoonKam.

Meanwhile, an announcement of the extension of the GRAIL mission arrived. Originally, it was supposed to last three months in anticipation of an eclipse which will cause a lack of sunlight to power the solar panels of Ebb and Flow. The fear was that two spacecrafts couldn’t survive the eclipse but those estimates were made with caution.

The tests carried out at the beginning of the mission instead showed that Ebb and Flow are working better than it had been estimated, therefore they should have accumulated enough energy in their batteries to survive the eclipse. A second round of mapping of the Moon’s gravity was therefore scheduled, which should start in September.

Now, Ebb and Flow have an altitude of about 55 km (about 34 miles) but for the second cycle of mapping the remaining fuel will be used to bring them in an even lower orbit which will be more elliptical than the current one. It’s expected that the average height will be slightly more than 22 km (about 14 miles) but the spacecraft will go as low as less than 7 km (about 4.3 miles) from the Moon’s surface. In this way, the readings of two spacecrafts will be even more precise.

While the photographs of the Moon are arriving, we wait for Ebb and Flow to send data on the Moon’s gravity to solve the mysteries of its formation, which is closely connected to the Earth’s formation.

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