Chang'e mission ends

[CalliArcale]

The population of lunar orbiting spacecraft has dropped by one over the weekend. After completing its lunar mapping mission, the Chinese spacecraft Chang'e was deliberately deorbited, impacting in Mare Fecunditatis.

Chang’e 1 impacts the Moon

The remaining (functional) spacecraft orbiting the Moon are Kaguya (aka Selene, from Japan) and Chandrayaan-1 (from India). They will be joined in a few months by NASA's massive Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.

 

[The_Chef]

For a while there were 3 probes orbiting The Moon. And not one of them was American. The LRO goes up this year(?) And not a day too soon IMO.

 

[CalliArcale]

For a while there were 3 probes orbiting The Moon. And not one of them was American. The LRO goes up this year(?) And not a day too soon IMO.

Barring launch delays at the Cape, LRO is scheduled to blast off on an Atlas 5 on May 25. It'll bring some really way-cool imaging technology to the Moon, and will also bring along a hitchhiker named LCROSS. LCROSS is a lunar impactor. Before it itself swan-dives into the Moon, it'll monitor the impact of LRO's Centaur upper stage. Lots of stuff has been tossed at the moon before, but this will be the first time the impact has been watched from relatively close-up.

 

[JonClarke]

A successful end to a successful mission. Congratulations to the Chang'e team. There are quite a few Chang'e papers at this year's LPSC, I will try to get to some of them. I am looking forward to the next Chinese mission too., hopefully it will be a lander.

 

[halcyondays]

Am I the only one with misgivings at the amount of hardware and junk we continue to chuck at the moon, something we've been doing for nearly 50 years ?

 

[earth_bound_misfit]

Am I the only one with misgivings at the amount of hardware and junk we continue to chuck at the moon, something we've been doing for nearly 50 years ?

Pretty much I suppose. I am concerned about the junk building up in LEO though.

 

[EarthlingX]

www.europlanet-eu.org : The first microwave image of the complete Moon

The first microwave image of the complete Moon has been obtained by the Chinese lunar satellite Chang’E-1. Global brightness temperature maps reveal radiation from the surface and deeper layers of the Moon and its diurnal variation. This will help astronomers to determine the detailed heat flow and, thus, the inner energy of the Moon. These exciting new results will be presented by Dr. Yong-Chun Zheng and Dr. Kwing L. Chan at the European Planetary Science Congress in Rome from Monday 20th to Wednesday 22d September.

Chang’E-1 (CE-1) is China’s first scientific mission to explore planetary bodies beyond Earth. The stereo camera, one of the eight science instruments on board the spacecraft, has produced a state-of the-art global image of the Moon with unprecedented image quality and positioning precision. The Solar Wind Ion Detector (SWID) has discovered the acceleration of scattered solar wind protons close to the lunar polar terminator. And now, the Lunar Microwave Radiometer (MRM) made it possible, for the first time, to globally map the Moon in microwave frequencies.

...

 

[3488]

WOW that's a fascinating new map of the Moon. It will be interesting to compare with LRO's visible, UV, IR & LOLA maps of the moon as well as those form Clementine.

Will be looking forward to when that has been properly analyzed & the lunar science to emerge.

Fascinating. :geek:

Andrew Brown.