 Credit: NASA |
Mission Updates
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Without the moon, many things would be very different for us here on Planet Earth. Our moon is critical to all life on our home Planet.
Finding out more about the structure of the lunar interior will give us the opportunity to reconstruct the thermal evolution of the Moon and it will probably tell us more about other Planets like Mercury, Venus and Mars. GRAIL will examine the Moon’s interieor from crust to core and answer many of the questions about our Moon that have not been answered yet. Knowledge of the interior and the evolution of the Moon will be greatly advanced by NASA’s GRAIL mission. Moon has not changed very much after it first formed, examining it will give scientists a chance to look into the distant past of planetary evolution. It is hoped that GRAIL will provide a full story on the Moon’s origin and the origin of phenomena that characterize it, like lunar maria, the diffence in crust thickness when comparing the near and the far side of the Moon and the puzzling magnetization of crustal rocks. GRAIL will study mascons that give ‘empty’ craters as much gravity as large mountains. Launching in September 2011, GRAIL begins its 240,000-mile journey to reach Moon around New Year’s Eve. After orbital insertion, the two spacecraft’s orbits will be reshaped over a period of about 3 months before the 82-day science phase of the mission starts. During the science mission, both vehicles will be ‘flying’ at varying distances to each other and different altitudes to gain better data on the Moon’s gravitational field. |
