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28.4 day old Moon
By KENNETH CHANG
NASA’s Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (click here) spacecraft slammed into the moon early Friday morning, as planned, but a few days earlier than NASA officials expected.
At
about 12:30 a.m. Eastern time, radio signals from the spacecraft
abruptly cut off just as it passed over to the far side of the moon.
Mission managers believe that is the moment when it ran into a crater
rim — they suspect they even know which crater rim — but that has not
been confirmed yet.
The
crash brought to a successful end a six-month, $280 million study of
the tenuous envelope of gases and dust surrounding the moon. With impact
at 3,600 miles per hour, the vending-machine-size spacecraft, called
Ladee (pronounced LAD-ee), broke up into pieces that heated up to
hundreds of degrees and partly vaporized. “It’s just a question of
whether Ladee made a localized craterlet on a hillside or scattered
debris across a flat area,” Richard C. Elphic, the project scientist,
said in a NASA news release....
