Right on schedule yesterday afternoon US time – and NASA orbital mechanicists are very good at setting and following schedules – the Grail Mission's two lunar gravity mapping spacecraft augured into a tall ridge rimming a crater near the Moon's north pole. Plenty of reporters filed on it, many but not all of the stories shorties. How can this not be news? It has violence but nobody gets hurt, the spectacle is easy to imagine even if nobody appears to have gotten any photographic evidence of dust flying, and it provides a dramatic angle to stamp "done" on an exquisitely scientific example of tax dollars at work.
Yesterday, on hearing that NASA has named the tall ridge that interrupted the flights of the low-skimming pair of instruments after the late astronaut Sally Ride led me to wonder if this is an unalloyed tribute. The spacecraft, nicknamed Ebb and Flow and each about the size of a clothes dryer, were dumped there so that they would not hit or scatter debris across anything as important as an old Apollo landing site or other historic archeological locale. My slight dismay evaporated when reading MSNBC's account from its able veteran space writer Alan Boyle at his Cosmic Log site. It is hardly his excloo of course but this is where I read that Ride, who died earlier this year of pancreatic cancer, worked hard on the Grail mission. She ran a program called WebKam through which students could help select targets for the Ebb and Flow cameras to photograph. Beside that, in an NBC clip linked at Boyle's site Ride's sister Bear says the naming of the impact site is a great honor for the family. OK then.
One more thing before getting to a general roundup of coverage. It is too bad that NASA has not the budget and scientific justification for putting such tag-team gravity mappers around a whole lot of solar system worlds. They would all need names. Ten years ago the similar Grace mission measured Earth's gravity field – and by inference the mass distribution of our planet – as two craft dubbed Tom and Jerry followed one another while precisely measuring their varying distances. There are many other names that could give similar cheer as the exquisite Ebb and Flow whose monikers so perfectly evoke their job. Who would not get a kick from Bob and Weave, Juke and Jive, or my favorite Rock and Roll? Second fave is Rhythm and Blues. So many. Bow and Curtsy, Give and Take, Toss and Turn, Flip and Flop, Zig and Zag…… Given the way they disposed of those yesterday, maybe Hit and Miss.
The gravity map itself, released earlier this month, is the most accurate for any object in the solar system, it says here. One good example of coverage of the map itself is at Universe Today by Nancy Atkinson;
Other stories, some filed before the impact:
- Time Magazine – Michael Lemonick: End of the GRAIL's Quest: NASA's Lunar Probes to Crash into the Moon ; As a longtime campaigner against overuse of what could be a decent metaphor if not beaten to death, "holy Grail," I do salute this twist on that potent myth. Lemonick has long asides not only on the successful mapping job the mission performed, but on examples of other deliberate impacts by space hardware that paid scientific dividends.
- NYTimes – Kenneth Chang: Probes Crash Into the Moon's Dark (Not Far) Side ; Indeed, the crag that made slag of Ebb and Flow was in shadow when they arrived. Ken plays a little joke here on overly punctilious minders of proper science terminology who go berserk if anybody calls the far side of the moon the dark side. He got tons of reaction ('gazillion' is his word for it) to his "dark side" reference in an advance yarn last week and which he makes part of this update.
- AFP: NASA crashes two probes, named Ebb and Flow, into the moon ;
- CNN: NASA moon crash video, photos: Ebb, Flow GRAIL probes go out with a bang on moon's north pole.
- Reuters – Irene Klotz: NASA crashes two probes into a mountain on the moon ;
- NPR – Veronique Lacapra: After A Year Of Study, Twin Probes Crash Into Moon ;
- Space.com – Robert Z. Pearlman: Twin Moon Probes Crash into Lunar Mountain ;
- Nat'l Geographic News – Jane J. Lee: GRAIL Mission goes out with a bang ;
- … many more
Grist for the Mill: NASA Press Release, GRAIL website ;
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