spacetoday.net: LRO spots impacts sites of GRAIL spacecraft

Posted: Tue, Mar 26, 2013, 8:11 AM ET (1211 GMT)
GRAIL impact crater (NASA)

A NASA orbiter has photographed the impacts sites of two other NASA spacecraft that crashed into the Moon in December. NASA released last week images taken by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) spacecraft of the impact sites of the twin Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) spacecraft, which hit the lunar surface on December 17. The spacecraft created craters approximately four to six meters in diameter, with dark ejecta patterns. LRO's instruments also detected traces of mercury in the plume kicked up by the impacts, consistent with what it detected when the LCROSS spacecraft crashed into the Moon's south polar regions in 2009. The GRAIL spacecraft had been in orbit for nearly a year, mapping the Moon's gravity field; the spacecraft crashed into the Moon when they exhausted their onboard propellant.