Europe's first Moon mission hailed a success
A fuel-efficient compact spacecraft has made it into lunar orbit, signalling Europe’s first successful mission to the Moon and putting the inexpensive probe on course to study the lunar surface.
Almost more impressive than reaching its destination was the slow and steady way the SMART-1 craft puttered its way there – flying 13 months in ever-expanding circles around Earth using a cutting-edge ion propulsion system.
The spacecraft used only 130lbs of the 181lbs of xenon fuel it had aboard.
“It works out to something like two million kilometres per litre, which is quite an achievement,” European Space Agency spokesman Franco Bonacina said from the space agency’s headquarters in Paris. That works out to more than five million miles per gallon.
The fuel consumption was less than expected and the success of the mission has raised hopes that the technology can be used to send other craft far deeper into space, where the chemical propulsion systems that power conventional rockets would be too expensive or unworkable.
“Europe has proved that it is able to fly a spaceship with ion propulsion alone,” Giorgio Saccoccia, one of the ESA’s propulsion specialists, said at the ESA’s control centre in Darmstadt, southern Germany.
Launched into Earth orbit from French Guiana on September 27, 2003, atop a conventional booster rocket, the SMART-1 probe made it to within 3,100 miles from the Moon on Monday morning and will now begin spinning its way closer to the surface as it orbits.
By mid-January the dishwasher-sized spacecraft will be in an elliptical orbit that will take it within 185 miles of the Moon’s south pole and 1,850 miles from the North Pole, Bonacina says.
“Today we have celebrated the successful technology mission, and now we start with science – we want to do imaging of the surface and study the chemistry of the Moon,” Bonacina said.
The ESA is hoping to use state-of-the-art equipment to take images of the surface from different angles and X-ray and infrared technology to allow scientists to draw up new three-dimensional models of the Moon’s surface.
SMART-1 will also be looking at the darker parts of the Moon’s south pole for the first time, and searching dark craters for signs of water.
Over the last 13 months, the 809lb probe has been edging its way toward the Moon in a mission controlled from the ESA’s operations centre in Darmstadt. It measures 3.3ft on each side, and solar panels, which help provide ion – or solar-electric – propulsion, spread 46ft.
Unlike conventional rockets, no fuel is “burned” but instead the solar panels provide electricity to charge the xenon gas atoms, which accelerate away from the spacecraft at high speed and produce forward thrust.
The surprising fuel efficiency of the spacecraft means that the agency might be able to extend its six-month scientific mission by up to a year, if it can find the additional funding, Bonacina says.
When the mission is eventually complete, the probe will be left to crash on to the Moon’s surface.
The mission marks the second time that ion propulsion has been used as a primary propulsion system. The first was the Deep Space 1 probe launched by Nasa in October 1998.
SMART-1, short for “Small Missions for Advanced Research and Technology,” was developed for ESA by the Swedish Space Corporation with contributions from some 30 contractors in Europe and the United States. It took off aboard an Ariane-5 rocket in September 2003.
The total cost for the mission is €125m, about a fifth of that required for a typical major space mission.
The success of the mission provides a much-needed boost for the European space programme, which is still smarting after its attempt to land a probe on Mars last year failed.
The British-built Beagle 2 was launched on the ESA’s Mars Express orbiter, and was supposed to touch down on the Red Planet to begin its search for life on Christmas Day 2003, but scientists have found no trace of the lander.
As the project failed, two US spacecraft landed on the surface of Mars, and sent back numerous pictures and extensive scientific data from the planet.
