Updating on the impact point: here:

http://sci.esa.int/science-e/www/object/in...fobjectid=39890

is a map of the impact point on a base made of AMIE images. Note that the impact points on my just-posted map are really perilune points, and the impact will occur slightly north of them. I'll fix that.

Phil

Foreseen operational duration:
2-2.5 years

Well...It will last more 5 months and one week than the 2.5 years predicted...
You can't rely a mission timetable anymore...

Edited: Humm...I was counting with the 14 months transfer period...That doesn't count, doesn't it?

Some Italian radio astronomers are conducting live tests for the upcoming impact:

http://www.geocities.com/priapus_dionysos/bsih.html

They say:

But, based on the last update, impact will occur tomorrow morning, at 5:42 UT!
This is a very bad new, also because europeans will not be able to see impact...
Hope some friend across ocean will do fo us!

A new ESA update today, as SMART-1 recovers from a tense 6 hours in "Safe Mode"

and the impact has been delayed by 1 minute as the orbit was raised by 592 meters due to terrain uncertainties

details in the link below, first 2 paragrahs reads as follows:

http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/SMART-1/SEMV386LARE_0.html

Intense final hours for SMART-1

2 September 2006
The final days of SMART-1's spectacularly successful mission have seen intense activity including a successful recovery from safe mode as mission controllers manoeuvre the craft into a planned Moon crash landing, newly estimated for 07:42 CEST Sunday, 3 September.

A tense, 6-hour recovery from an unexpected safe mode activation, one of the quickest in recent ESA spacecraft operations memory, allowed manoeuvres to proceed nominally during the night of 1-2 September aimed at avoiding a premature Moon impact.

Cheer up! Don't sleep overnight!

Rodolfo

An animation made of some star tracker images from 1 Sept is available.
Article
Full animation (.wmv - 1730 kb)

Nice. The bright crater they mention is Aristarchus.

Phil

This is Clementine long wavelength infrared - the best resolution except for the HIRES camera, which only worked well near the poles - at the SMART-1 impact site. The target is slightly east of this strip. I'm looking at the next strip over now.

Phil

Click to view attachment

A new update from Spaceflightnow.com
http://www.spaceflightnow.com/news/n0609/02smart1/

first few paragraphs below, has a few more tidbits compared to the ESA new release

Europe's lunar orbiter to impact the moon Sunday
BY STEPHEN CLARK
SPACEFLIGHT NOW
Posted: September 2, 2006

A European space probe is just hours away from a violent crash into the lunar surface that ground-based scientists hope will help answer debated questions about the Moon's sub-surface.

The exact timing of the impact remains unknown, but European Space Agency officials say their most recent estimates place the event at 0542 GMT (1:42 a.m. EDT) Sunday morning.

Well, unfortunately the Clementine LWIR image strips don't cover the nominal impact point. Here is a mosaic of four orbits, containing all the images in the area. The nominal impact point is right in the middle, between the two strips. Each strip is a composite of two orbits. This can be compared with the new AMIE mosaic to see where the strips lie.

LWIR images are difficult to process but give very nice views of the surface, as long as the point you want is covered!

Phil

(PS does anyone else on planet Earth actually use these images?)

Click to view attachment

Does anyone know if there's anywhere on the web broadcasting live via telescope? I'm telescope challenged and was hoping to see the impact..

Spaceflightnow ( www.spaceflightnow.com/news ) says the best phots might come from Amateur astronomers, the guys over at nasaspaceflight were running a live thread with impact images from a webcam inside the ESA controll room.


Still no press release....but they have a lot of info on Europe's pre-impact activities as Smart-1 comes to an end

The ESA website says 'ESA-webportal will publish results as soon as they are available late on 2 September and early on 3 September.'

According to the ESA, the impact took place according to schedule.

http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/SMART-1/SEMBY5BVLRE_0.html

I've been chasing the news, but it has been scarce so far. Apparently an observatory in Hawaii detected a "bright flash," according to this article.

The CFHT image of the flash is available here.

Thanks, Jyril... I suspect these are the very first published images of the impact.
About the flash, apparently the explosion is big: it's apparent size is 24 pixel (or 7 arcsec) in the outermost part and 9pixel/2.7arcsec in the inner/most luminous (saturated?) region... these numbers correspond to a "hot gas bubble" of 5-12Km diameter. I do not know if these value are "real" because, even if well above instrument resolution (a fraction of arcsec, see here), we do not know the atmospheric conditions and they do not published the FWHM figure... in fact, I suspect that the true moon surface detail are the very blurred (do not considetr the very dark spots or other bright, well defined features probably arising from the sensor) and, based on this, seeing is very bad and SN ratio is high.
Probably, only some convoluted image can tell us real size of the bubble.
Obviously, SMART crater isn't visible (should be less than 1/60 pixel size)

I suspect the brightness of the flash will be much more useful than measuring its dimensions (which is very dependant on seeing conditions, instrument characteristics and the sort). I wonder if any good spectra were acquired?

The impact site would be a good target for the future Lunar Reconaissance orbiter..

Given the low impact speed, this is *not* a hypervelocity impact. Metal and rock debris leaving the impact crater at high velocity will be hot, but probably barely hot enough to glow thermally at visual wavelengths. <I'd like to see a calculation on the maximum kinetic heating possible> There should be some visible flash from remaining hydrazine and maybe shorting batteries and the like.. hard to guess how much.

I'd think a flash would be much more visible at thermal infrared wavelengths.. 5 micrometer or longer. Having an acutal flash dection will pinpoint the impact point better than raw spacecraft L.O.S. timing, I'd presume, and provide a good coordinate for future high and eventually ultra-high imaging.

SMART-1 on IFR
http://www.cfht.hawaii.edu/News/Smart1/

There are some brief reports at the Planetary society website;

http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00000688/
http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00000686/ (includes a beautiful mosaic of the impact region from ESA, also at ESA site)

mosaic link:
http://esamultimedia.esa.int/images/smart_...onAMIEMap_H.jpg

there are about 4. check the weblog for more:

Just As Planned

Sep. 2, 2006 | 23:00 PDT | Sep. 3 06:00 UTC

Weblog Archiveby Jennifer Vaughn

SMART-1 scientist Detlef Koschy confirmed that mission control lost the SMART-1 signal at 10:42:19. He reported that folks at ESOC applauded when the "mission ended just as planned." Team members at ESOC are now downloading final pictures. SMART-1 took images up to about 5 minutes before impact.

We also heard from a group of amateur astronomers who have set up at Los Angeles' Griffith Observatory. They did not observe anything unusual, nor did we see anything here at The Planetary Society. We're still waiting to hear from the worldwide network of observatories to see if an impact blast or ejecta plume was seen.

I can only confirm whats been said, but yes the Swedish Space Corporation have that image up now also with a link to the Canada France Hawaii Telescope.
Someone might wonder what the Swedish Space Corporation got to do with SMART? Well SMART was proposed and designed by SSC, and built by Saab/Ericsson space (Formerly Saab-aerospace) in Linköping Sweden. After completion SMART was handed over to ESA for launch and the daily operations of the mission.

I was just thinking about how many things have hit or landed on the moon... some we might be uncertain about - are the Soviet orbiters still in orbit, for instance? - Luna 10 was high enough that it may still be in orbit - but making a few assumptions, I think SMART-1 may be the 60th spacecraft to reach the surface. I count 20 Lunas (including upper stages of two of them), five Rangers, seven Surveyors, five Lunar Orbiters, 20 bits of Apollo hardware, Hiten, Prospector and SMART-1. I'm not counting things like the Luna 9 landing stage or the Surveyor main engines, ejected before landing, and I'm not counting Luna 17 and Lunokhod 1 (etc) as two items. So a bit of a fudged list.

Some we can't locate on a map - e.g. the Apollo 16 LM ascent stage or the Apollo 15 subsatellite. I think that 50 could be plotted on a map.

Not sure if the telescope/camera has the resolution to pick out a crater from the impact, but it sure
looks like there is something visible from the before and after pictures.

The crater is expected to be 3 x 10m..... you're not going to see if from the ground. You're not going to see if with Hubble. You're not going to see it until LRO starts mapping at 50cm/pixel in a few years time.

Doug

True, the actual crater may not be visible, but the ejecta may change the albedo for a much broader area on the order of hundreds of square meters. But even this may not show up with a wide angle view. I look
forward to some high res pictures of the area.

The Apollo 14 LM ascent stage impacted in a mare area west of the landing site. Its impact crater was not seen, but its ejecta was identified by Ewen Whitaker (Apollo 16 Preliminary Science Report). (just to show that the crater itself need not be visible).

Phil

A is Apollo 12 image AS12-56-8439, showing the location of B. B is part of Apollo 16 metric camera frame 2508 rectified from its original oblique geometry.

Click to view attachment

Approximate impact zone:

The impact region lies about two-thirds down, directly above the small gap in the mosaic, just south-east of the small crater Palmieri A in the direction of crater Doppelmayer W

ESA estimates that impact occurred at 46.2º West, 34.4º South.

I have enclosed a pinpoint impact zone:

Click to view attachment

Rodolfo

From Space.com article.

"Dust and other material ejected off the Moon were expected to possibly be visible to observers with big telescopes back here on Earth."

You'd have to be very fast. Dust is ballistic on the Moon.

tty

It's not easy to compare the CFHT image of the flash with the AMIE map, but using the Consolidated Lunar Atlas as an intermediate step, I think this is the location of the flash:

Click to view attachment

Almost exactly where it was expected, but maybe slightly east of the expected groundtrack. Of course, the observers will do better, but it's interesting to try.

Phil

some more stuff, including some movies:

http://www.esa.int/esaCP/SEMC378ZMRE_index_0.html

This is my current SMART-1 map, as I understand it now, or think I do. The last item to be plugged into my book except for the foreword, which is now being written.

There's a bit of confusion sometimes between periapsis and impact points, but I think I have it sorted out in the top map - B -. White dots are pre-August impact predictions, black dots are August 17 predictions. In the lower image - C -, plotted on an AMIE mosaic (original provided by Bernard Foing with his permission to use it), I show the August 17 and September 2 predictions and what i think is the location of the IR flash seen at CFHT.

Phil

Fig 363? I am looking forward to your book! It must be well illustrated

Here is a side by side comparison of an area immediately to the west of the SMART-1 impact point (west of it because the Clementine image doesn't cross the impact site itself).

I'm comparing Lunar Orbiter 4 - the new USGS digital version - with Clementine long-wavelength infrared (LWIR) and AMIE. Warning - this is not a fair comparison for AMIE because it's not raw data. This is just cropped out of the big mosaic of the landing area recently posted. This shows LO4 and Clem at full resolution. The AMIE image is enlarged to match the scale, hence its fuzziness.

It is possible that raw AMIE images would equal the resolution of the other two, or get fairly close, near the periapsis latitude. A few other points can be made - the lighting is reversed from Lunar Orbiter, so areas lost in shadow in Orbiter will be seen in AMIE and vice versa - especially important near the poles. And Orbiter coverage of the farside is inferior to this nearside area, so AMIE will at least equal it in many areas. And the Clem LWIR is only available in narrow strips. So we benefit most by having access to all three types of image. AMIE apparently took 20,000 images. When they are released - and especially if good global mosaics are constructed - they will be a very useful addition to lunar databases. And let's not forget that, although several other orbiters are planned, we don't know how many will actually fly successfully.

Phil

Click to view attachment

It is evident that Clementine LWIR has better pictures than Lunar Orbiter 4 and the ones of AMIES looks fuzzier due to the stretch scratch process. Anyway, all of these pictures are of black & white or the Moon has inhereted to only two colores: black and white.

The morphology of Lunar surface has made me to be inquietant. Its tendency of forming the surface does not agree to others places such as Earth and Mars in which they surface are constantly eroded by others process.

Rodolfo
P.D.Corrected the expresion.

Scratch process?

Doug

Already corrected --> Stretch

Thanks, Rodolfo

Well - I'll still ask the same question - why do the images look fuzzy because of a 'stretch' process?

Doug

It is according to Phil's post http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.p...ost&p=66774
The AMIE image is enlarged to match the scale, hence its fuzziness.

Rodolfo

One for British Forum members...

SMART 1's last image revealed

and another....

Don't be silly. Button Moon was just puppets. Everyone knows the Clangers are real...

noooooo say it ain't so.... It's real dammit! It has to be....

C'mon man, you can see the strings... ain't no strings on Clangers...

("What's that Soup Dragon? Some inconsiderate European guy dropped a ruddy great washing machine sized spaceprobe on your cave and now there's no blue string soup? How terrible!")

Priceless Stu...

But there are some slightly visible changes on the ground from the 15secs before and 15secs after the impact images:

http://i16.photobucket.com/albums/b14/ustrax3/smart1.jpg

I was about to say... How do you know it's changes to the ground and not an ejecta cloud..

Then I thought -hmm - I'll do some image work myself - where's the movie...

Then went to find it and found this

http://sci.esa.int/science-e/www/object/in...fobjectid=39968

Doug

is that a simple differencing of the images wrt the pre-impact image? Looks cool though!

edit - here's the animation of it...you can clearly see somthing hitting from above and then making a crash landing like longjumpers do

http://www.cfht.hawaii.edu/News/Smart1/#Dust