NASA Moon mission ends with intentional crash landing
APR 21, 2014
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.027860
Los Angeles Times : After a lifetime of just seven months, NASA’s Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) crashed into the surface of the far side of the Moon on 18 April. Part of a planned maneuver, the collision marked the end of LADEE‘s mission to study the Moon’s extremely thin atmosphere and lunar dust. LADEE also tested a two-way laser communication system, which set a downlink record of 622 megabits per second from spacecraft to Earth, six times the speed of radio communications. LADEE‘s crash landing will provide further data as scientists study where it hit and what impact it had on the Moon’s surface.
© 2014 American Institute of Physics
