One NASA spacecraft has captured an image of the "grave" of another, a crater on the moon created by the impact of the Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer mission craft, the space agency announced.
A camera on NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter snapped a photo of the impact site created April 18 of this year by the planned crashing of the LADEE probe on the rim of a crater on the far side of the moon.
The location for an impact on the moon's far side was chosen to avoid Apollo mission landing sites and other spots of historical importance involved in lunar missions.
"I'm happy that the LROC team was able to confirm the LADEE impact point," said LADEE project manager Butler Hine, of NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California. "It really helps the LADEE team to get closure and know exactly where the product of their hard work wound up."
LADEE was launched in September, 2013, orbiting the moon to record detailed data on the composition and structure of the extremely thin lunar atmosphere.
The LRO spacecraft has been in orbit around the moon since its September 2009 launch, gathering lunar data and images for research.
When LADEE controllers sent the spacecraft on its final dive toward the surface of the moon, tracking data gave them a fair idea of where it would land, but they had no visual proof of where the craft came down until the LRO camera provided the visual proof.
The image showed LADEE impacted the moon less than 1,000 feet from where the controllers had predicted it would.
At the moment of impact LADEE was traveling at 3,600 mph, not very fast by cosmic impact standards, and because of the low density and mass of the prove the resulting crater is less than 10 feet across.
That's just about at the lower limit of features that can be resolved by the cameras on the lunar orbiter.
Finding the LADEE impact crater was considered the perfect first test task for a new computer tool that lets scientists compare before and after images of the lunar surface taken by the LRO.
"As it turns there were several small surface changes found in the predicted area of the impact, the biggest and most distinctive was within 968 feet of the spot estimated by the LADEE operations team," said Mark Robinson, principal investigator for the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera from Arizona State University in Tempe. "What fun!"
