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This Is the Crater NASA Made When It Smashed a Spacecraft Into the Moon

Finding a hole on the moon from 250,000 feet away isn't easy.
Image: George Melies/Wikimedia Commons

While the focus was on  spaceships crashing back to Earth, NASA just announced that it had finally found where it had hit the Moon six months ago.

The space agency announced that its Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter spotted the crater that the Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer—LADEE, to its friends—made when it was deliberately steered into the Moon in April.

For those who don't remember, LADEE successfully launched from Wallops Island in September of 2013. By October, it was orbiting the Moon, studying its dust and atmosphere. By April 11, 2014, LADEE's work was done. Its engines fired to send it to the far side of the Moon, where its crash wouldn't disrupt the Apollo landing sites.

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LADEE went down slowly; orbiting the Moon lower and lower and gathering data on the lunar mountains and craters as they grew closer, and finally a week later, the probe crashed as planned.

The spacecraft was going pretty slowly by the time it hit the Moon—just 3,800 miles per hour, which by space standards is just drag-assin' it. As a point of comparison, the International Space Station goes about 17,150 miles per hour. Anyway, LADEE's slow speed meant that it left just a wisp of a crater, just ten feet across. Finding the crater was therefore a challenge for the LRO's cameras and the team's ability to notice tiny changes very very far away.

"The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) team recently developed a new computer tool to search Narrow Angle Camera (NAC) before and after image pairs for new craters," Mark Robinson, LROC principal investigator from Arizona State University in Tempe, said in a press release. "The LADEE impact event provided a fun test."

Image: NASA

Finding the crater not only proved the efficacy of the LROC's NAC, but also it proved how great NASA is at deliberately crashing its own spaceships some 250,000 miles away.

"As it turns there were several small surface changes found in the predicted area of the impact. The biggest and most distinctive was within 968 feet of the spot estimated by the LADEE operations team," Robinson said. "What fun!"

Butler Hine, the LADEE product manager at Ames Research Center added that he was happy they were able to find the crater.

"It really helps the LADEE team to get closure and know exactly where the product of their hard work wound up," Hine said.

With all due respect to Hine, the product of their hard work is probably better described as the data that LADEE generated before crashing into the Moon, but  it's only understandable to get attached to tools.