NASA has released the last video of the GRAIL mission spacecraft, which crashed into the surface of the moon on December 17, 2012. The nearly two-minute long video gives a stunning fly-by of the moon's surface before the spacecraft smashed onto the surface.
According to the video's description, the footage was taken by NASA GRAIL (Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory) mission's MoonKAM (Moon Knowledge Acquired by Middle School Studets) camera on the satellite Ebb three days before the crash, on December 14. The GRAIL mission included two identical satellites, Ebb and Flow, which were named in a student naming contest.
The description added, "At the time the images were taken, the spacecraft were about 6 miles above the northern hemisphere of the moon's far side, in the vicinity of the Jackson impact crater."
According to CBS News, the mission was established to map out the moon's gravitational field and gain better insight into its internal structure. Ebb and Flow had been flying at low altitudes since January 2012, CBS News reported. According to NASA, GRAIL used a gravity-measuring technique similar to that of the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) that has been mapping Earth's gravity since 2002.
CBS News reported that NASA decided to use the last of the GRAIL mission's fuel to smash Ebb and Flow into the moon. The two spacecraft pummeled into the moon's surface as a rate over a mile per second.
- Contribute to this Story:
- Send us a tip
- Send us a photo or video
- Suggest a correction
