NASA's upcoming GRAIL mission will provide new information about how the moon formed and will allow students to take their own pictures of its surface, panelists announced at a news conference at NASA headquarters in Washington on Thursday.
GRAIL (the Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory) will send two spacecraft to the moon, most likely next month. The 42-day launch window begins September 8, GRAIL project manager David Lehman said.
The two spacecraft will be launched in the same housing, which will separate. They will enter synchronized orbits in January, principal investigator Maria Zuber said. The slow trip saves energy. Once in orbit, their speeds will increase when they pass over formations on the moon's surface, allowing scientists to measure those formations based on the distance between the two spacecraft.
The project aims to study how the moon formed, its interior composition and why the side seen from Earth looks so different from the "far side," which isn't as dark because of lava flows, Zuber said.
SOURCE CNN NEWS
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