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NASA spacecraft completes mission with planned lunar impact

18 April 2014 20:34 (UTC +04:00)

Baku-APA. U.S. space agency NASA said Friday that its Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) spacecraft completed its mission and crashed into the far side of the moon as planned.

The LADEE spacecraft lacked fuel to maintain a long-term lunar orbit or continue science operations and intentionally impacted the surface of the moon between 00:30 and 01:22 a.m. EDT Friday (0430 GMT and 0522 GMT), NASA said in a statement.

NASA engineers believed that the spacecraft, the size of a vending machine, broke apart, with most of its material heating up several hundred degrees or even vaporizing at the surface.

Any material that remained is likely buried in shallow craters, the space agency said.

"At the time of impact, LADEE was traveling at a speed of 3,600 miles (about 5,800 kilometers) per hour -- about three times the speed of a high-powered rifle bullet," said Rick Elphic, LADEE project scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center.

"There's nothing gentle about impact at these speeds -- it's just a question of whether LADEE made a localized craterlet on a hillside or scattered debris across a flat area."

In early April, the spacecraft was commanded to carry out maneuvers that would lower its closest approach to the lunar surface.

The new orbit brought LADEE to altitudes below one mile (1.6 kilometers) above the lunar surface, lower than most commercial airliners fly above Earth, enabling scientists to gather unprecedented science measurements.