Graves of the GRAIL twins

Before and after the GRAIL twins impacts on the Moon December 17, 2012. The LROC Narrow Angle Camera (NAC) directors were able to resolve the impact sites on February 28, 2013, revealing both to be about 5 meters in diameter. Upper panels show the area before the impact; lower panels after the impact. Arrows point to crater locations. LROC NAC observations M186085512R, M186078336L, M1116736474R and M1116736474L. Full size Featured Image HERE  [NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University].

Jeffrey Plescia
LROC News System

The Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) mission ended on 17 December 2012 at 14:28 PST (-8 hrs. relative to Universal Time) when the two spacecraft GRAIL A (Ebb) and GRAIL B (Flow) impacted the Moon.

Both impact sites lie on the southern slope of an unnamed massif (mountain) that lies south of the crater Mouchez and northeast of the crater Philolaus.

The massif stands as much as 2500 m above the surrounding plains. The impact sites are at an elevation of about 750 and 1040 meter, respectively, about 460-750 m below the summit.

Artist conception of the orbital track of the two spacecraft just before impact. Both spacecraft were tracking north as their altitude continuously decreased until they impacted the south side of the massif [NASA/JPL].

The two GRAIL spacecraft were relatively small - cubes about the size of a washing machine with a mass of about 200 kg (441 lbs) at the time of impact. When they arrived at the Moon their mass was closer to 278 kg (619 lbs), but about 78 kg (172 lbs) of that was fuel consumed during lunar operations. Both spacecraft impacted at very low angles (~2° to the horizontal) at about 1600 m/s (faster than a speeding bullet) into a fairly steep slope! LROC images reveal that both spacecraft formed craters about 5 m (15 ft) in diameter. Surprisingly, the ejecta around both craters is dark and irregularly distributed around the crater; there is little ejecta to the south - the direction from which the spacecraft were traveling.

GRAIL A site seen before and after the impact event. Crater center is located at 75.609°N, 333.407°E [NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University].

Typically ejecta from craters has a higher reflectance than the target material (think of the rays of Tycho). This normal contrast is due to the excavation of fresh (or immature) soil from beneath a more mature, weathered layer. As the lunar regolith is exposed to the vacuum of space, it suffers exposure to cosmic radiation, solar wind bombardment, and micrometeorite impacts. Slowly over time, these processes tend to darken the soil. Thus, if you dig down beneath the surface you will find higher reflectance soil.

GRAIL B site seen before and after impact event. Crater center is located at 75.651°N, 333.168°E [NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University].

So why do both GRAIL craters exhibit low reflectance rays? Perhaps we are seeing carbon from the spacecraft. The structure was made of a cyanate ester composite (carbon rich) and other materials also had carbon as primary compounds. Additionally, there was about 0.5 kg (1.1 lbs) of fuel remaining in each spacecraft. Due to the energy of impact, the carbon from these varied sources may have been released and mixed with and coated the ejecta. It takes only a very small amount of carbon to darken a material, recall in art class when you put just a few drops of black paint into a lighter color and it went all muddy. But right now we do not know for sure the cause of this interesting anomaly!

LRO Wide Angle Camera (WAC) image of the GRAIL impact area on the south side of the unnamed massif. LRO WAC M120020350 [NASA/GSFC/ASU].

On 28 February 2013 the LROC obtained a stereo pair for the impact area and from these images the LROC team produced a controlled preliminary topographic map. From the stereo model latitude, longitude and elevation were derived for each impact crater: GRAIL A 75.609°N, 333.407°E, 750 meters and for GRAIL B 75.651°N, 333.168°E, 1040 meters. The local slope of the mountain at the point of impact was 23° for GRAIL A and 19° for GRAIL B. As knowledge of the spacecraft position is refined the LROC team will update these coordinates. The two impact craters are about 2210 m apart; GRAIL B impacted about 20 seconds after GRAIL A at a site to the northwest of GRAIL A.

LROC NAC stereo derived topographic map of the GRAIL Impact area, map is 8400 meters wide, north is up [NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University].

Find the GRAIL impact craters in the full NAC image, HERE.

Related Posts:
Parting shots from Ebb MoonKAM prior to impact
Ebb and Flow Finale
Rocket Impacts Recorded by the Apollo Seismic Network
Apollo 14 S-IVB Impact Crater
Mountains of the Moon
LROC Coordinates of Robotic Spacecraft
Ejecta Sweeps the Surface

Students to exhibit GRAIL MoonKAM images

Forward view from a MoonKAM camera on-board GRAIL Ebb looks down into 29.6 kilometer Titov and south-southwestward over surrounding floor of Mare Moscoviense, in the northern lunar farside. MoonKam image 8108, Robert McCall School, May 19, 2012 [NASA/Caltech-JPL/MIT/SRS].

Reporters have been invited to an exhibit of student-directed MoonKam images of the lunar surface captured by NASA's GRAIL twin spacecraft, Ebb and Flow, Friday, June 1, from 10 am until Noon, EDT, at the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center, 1300 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, DC.

The event will showcase the MoonKAM (Moon Knowledge Acquired by Middle school students) education and public outreach project flying in lunar orbit on the GRAIL spacecraft. 

MoonKAM provides students around the world with an opportunity to identify and choose images of the moon's surface using small cameras aboard NASA's Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) mission. Thousands of images of lunar targets have been selected by fifth to eighth-grade students since.the GRAIL twins arrived in lunar orbit with the New Year.

MoonKAM is operated by Sally Ride Science in collaboration with undergraduate students at the University of California in San Diego. 

Sally Ride, CEO of the science education company (and America's first woman in space) will host the event and provide opening remarks. Event presenters include NASA deputy administrator Lori Garver and GRAIL principal investigator Maria Zuber of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Meanwhile, it was announced earlier this week that the primary science mission of the GRAIL mission was completed ahead of schedule. An extended mission will continue at least through December.

GRAIL twins to be officially renamed January 17

Follow GRAIL A and B, along with the full range
of robotic probes in orbit and deep space through
the JPL Eyes on the Solar System web
application [NASA/JPL].

NASA will host a news conference at 1800 UT, Tuesday, January 17, to announce the names selected from a nationwide student contest for twin spacecraft that will study the moon in unprecedented detail. The event will be held at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

Nine hundred classrooms and more than 11,000 students from 45 states, as well as Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia, participated in the contest that began in October 2011.

The agency's twin Gravity Recovery And Interior Laboratory (GRAIL A/B) spacecraft successfully achieved lunar orbit on New Year's Eve and New Year's Day, respectively. The status of the spacecraft and upcoming plans for science operations also will be discussed.

NASA Television and the agency's website will broadcast the live event.The participants will be John Grunsfeld, associate administrator, Science Mission Directorate, NASA HQ; Leland Melvin, associate administrator for Education, NASA HQ; Maria Zuber, GRAIL principal investigator, MIT, Cambridge, MA & Sally Ride, president and CEO, Sally Ride Science, San Diego along with the teacher and students who submitted the selected contest-winning names for the GRAIL spacecraft.

The event will be carried live on Ustream, with a live chat box available, at: http://www.ustream.tv/nasajpl2 .

For more information about GRAIL, visit: http://grail.nasa.gov/ - http://www.nasa.gov/grail/ or the GRAIL science site at MIT http://moon.mit.edu/.

For NASA TV streaming video, downlink and schedule information, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/nasatv .

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, CA manages the GRAIL mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. The GRAIL mission is part of the Discovery Program managed at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Denver built the spacecraft. JPL is a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

GRAIL tandem on target for 2011

The GRAIL (Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory) spacecraft concept, designed to further improve maps of the Moon's anisotropic gravity well and the composition of its interior, taking advantage of a stable lunar lithosphere to read the history of the inner Solar System [NASA/JPL/GSFC/MIT].

Engineers at Lockheed-Martin Space Systems in Denver, CO have conducted a fuel tank check of one of NASA's GRAIL mission spacecraft (Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory) scheduled for launch in 2011.

"Confirming the size and fit of manufactured components is one of the steps required prior to welding the spacecraft's fuel tanks into the propulsion system's feed lines," according to a news release from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, CA.

"The GRAIL mission will fly twin spacecraft (spacecraft "A" and "B") in tandem orbits around the moon for several months to measure its gravity field in unprecedented detail. The mission will also answer longstanding questions about Earth's moon, and provide scientists a better understanding of how Earth and other rocky planets in the solar system formed."

The GRAIL spacecraft concept builds on a legacy of similar tandem satellite concepts, including most recently the twin sub-satellites flown with Japan's SELENE-1. Tiny changes in Ka band transmission time between the two spacecraft, which will arrive in lunar orbit 50 hours apart, and also between each of the spacecraft and ground stations on Earth, will allow investigators to detail the uneven composition of the Moon's interior.

The rationale for the mission, and other details, are detailed by the mission's host, the renowned Massachusetts Institute for Technology (MIT).

"The Moon is the most accessible and best studied of rocky, or "terrestrial", bodies beyond Earth. Unlike Earth, however, the Moon's surface geology preserves the record of nearly the entirety of 4.5 billion years of solar system history. Orbital observations combined with samples of surface rocks returned to Earth, show that no other body preserves the record of geological history so clearly as the Moon.

"The structure and composition of the lunar interior (and by inference the nature and timing of internal melting and heat loss) hold the key to reconstructing this history. Longstanding questions such the origin of the maria, the reason for the nearside-farside asymmetry in crustal thickness, and the explanation for the puzzling magnetization of crustal rocks, all require a greatly improved understanding of the Moon’s interior. Deciphering the structure of the interior will bring understanding of the evolution of the Moon itself, and also extend knowledge of the origin and thermal evolution of the Moon to other bodies in the inner solar system. For example, while the Moon was once thought to be unique in developing a "magma ocean" shortly after accretion, and now such a phenomenon has now been credibly proposed for Mars as well.

"This need to understand the internal structure in order to reconstruct planetary evolution motivates the GRAIL primary science objectives, which are to determine the structure of the lunar interior from crust to core and to further the understanding of the thermal evolution of the Moon. The GRAIL mission will accomplish these goals by performing global, regional and local high-resolution (30x30 km), high-accuracy gravity field measurements with twin, low-altitude (50 km) polar-orbiting spacecraft using a Ka-band ranging instrument."

The GRAIL Science Team will conduct six lunar science investigations:

* Map the structure of the crust & lithosphere.
* Understand the Moon’s asymmetric thermal evolution.
* Determine the subsurface structure of impact basins and the origin of mascons.
* Ascertain the temporal evolution of crustal brecciation and magmatism.
* Constrain deep interior structure from tides.
* Place limits on the size of the possible inner core."

GRAIL operations and preliminary data processing will be handled by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and noted lunar and planetary scientist Maria Zuber is principal investigator for the GRAIL mission.

Former astronaut Sally Ride will also head up a K-12 educational outreach project utilizing live television transmissions from five on-board "Moonkams."

Together with LRO and LADEE, GRAIL was originally funded as a necessary robotic precursor mission ahead of "extended human activity on the Moon," as mapped by the National Academies of Sciences Space Studies Board in 2007.

Engineers conduct checks on one of two NASA GRAIL spacecraft. The image was taken June 29, 2010 during the propulsion subsystem assembly and integration effort in the Space Support Building clean room at Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Denver.

Space Panel Finds No Good Options

Jefferson Morris
Aviation Week

Early results of cost analysis by the Augustine human spaceflight panel have found no good options for continuing human exploration of space within the constraints set by the Obama administration's fiscal 2010 budget plan for NASA.

"This budget is simply not friendly to exploration," panel member and former astronaut Sally Ride said during the group's final public meeting in Washington Aug. 12. "It's very difficult to find an exploration scenario that fits within this very restrictive budget guidance that we've been given."

Read the Full Article HERE.

UPDATE: Presidential panel: future of U.S. manned-spaceflight is bleak

Mark K. Matthews and Robert Block
The Write Stuff
Orlando Sentinel

NASA's Constellation program, conceived four years ago to return Americans to the moon by 2020, can't afford to do that --and the agency's budget won't allow humans to explore beyond the international space station for two decades, a presidential panel has concluded.

NASA's annual budget of about $18 billion will pay to keep astronauts flying -- albeit aboard Russian rockets -- to the space station through 2020, the panel said Wednesday. But that would leave no money for the moon, Mars or exploring other parts of the solar system for at least two decades.

"We haven't found a scenario that includes exploration that's viable," said former astronaut Sally Ride, one of 10 committee members who have until Aug. 31 to present President Barack Obama with future options for NASA.

Panel chairman Norm Augustine, the retired CEO of Lockheed Martin, said NASA is the victim of both budget cuts and technical problems with its Constellation program of new rockets and capsules that are supposed to return humans to the moon.

"The money available has declined considerably since the program began," he said. "On the other hand, the Constellation program has proven to be more difficult than it was thought to be."

Augustine added, "It will be difficult with the current budget to do anything that's terribly inspiring in the human spaceflight area. On the other hand, there are things you can do to prepare ... It just won't come as soon."

The panel said it would take at least $3 billion more per year for NASA to have a "reasonable chance" of getting to the moon or elsewhere in the solar system before 2030. And while committee members seemed to support more money, it's not clear where, in a time of trillion-dollar-plus federal deficits, the cash would come from.

Ultimately, the panel agreed on four broad options, which it will present to White House budget officials next week. They include:

Pressing ahead with the Constellation program as quickly as funding allows; extending the life of the space station until 2020 and using commercial rockets to get there while working on future exploration rockets; flying the shuttle until as late as 2015 while working on a shuttle-variation design that could get to the moon; and developing a new large rocket to explore the solar system.

However, the panel acknowledged that none of those options would extend flights beyond the space station in the next decade without more money.

The panel's pessimistic assessment of NASA's manned-space future contradicts years of assertions by the agency that despite budget cuts totaling about $30 billion over the next decade, its moon-landing program was on track and within budget. However, the panel said those cuts, combined with expensive technical problems such as violent shaking by the Ares I rocket, have left its future in doubt.

Constellation has spent more than $9 billion since 2005 to develop the Ares I and V rockets and the Orion crew capsule. But the $81 billion projected through 2020 for that program, operation of the space station and flying the space shuttle through 2011 is not nearly enough, the panel said.

"We are on a path right now, for a system that requires [roughly] double the current budget just to operate," said Jeff Greason, a panel member and co-founder of XCOR Aerospace.

"If Santa Claus brought us this [Constellation] system tomorrow, fully developed, and the budget didn't change, our next action would have to be to cancel it," he said.

"Yup," responded Ride.

Ed Crawley, an engineering professor from MIT, noted that NASA's budget would enable the agency to extend the space station from 2015 to 2020, or develop the Ares I rocket to take astronauts there by 2016 -- but not both.

"The Ares I option just doesn't make any sense" he said.

But Bohdan Bejmuk, an aerospace consultant who chaired the panel's Constellation review, said the program potentially could succeed.

"If the problem is money, let's try to figure out how to get NASA more money," he said. "Let's get to the root cause."

If there was one winner Wednesday, it was commercial space companies, which the panel said should take cargo, crew and possibly rocket fuel and fuel tanks into orbit. Ride urged $200 million more to further develop fledgling cargo capabilities and $2.5 billion for competitive programs that would help private companies develop capsules to ferry astronauts to the space station and elsewhere in space.

"We have all come to realize how important [commercial] cargo is to the future of ISS," said Ride.

Iconography, in a handbag

They are only human, after all. Talented Talent, and it is a reminder marketing and those who market are talented people, also. People in politics who are smart, admittedly rare though they may be, catch on to the fact and depart from orthodoxy, sooner or later. Business is about survival not discretionary spending. Even if you make handbags, the product may be a discretionary item for the consumer but sales must be a recurring thing if you are to survive.

Entertainment, not information, is the coin of the realm.

Heads up WSJ Speakeasy