Science Results in 9 minutes live at
http://live.projectionnet.com/agupress/fm2012.aspx

Pics and maps here. A deeply fractured crust.

Phil

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/grail/mu...lery-index.html

now on Science Express:
Ancient Igneous Intrusions and Early Expansion of the Moon Revealed by GRAIL Gravity Gradiometry
The Crust of the Moon as Seen by GRAIL
Gravity Field of the Moon from the Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) Mission

Hmm. Looking over the maps doesn't seem to show any obvious discrepancy that would imply a low velocity impact. Thats one strike against the two moon hypothesis. Personally, I'm rather happy. Didn't like that theory much anyway. Our Moon is a unique object.

Anyway, excellent news! I hope NASA scientists can pull more info out of the new data in the future. For our closest neighbor, there is still a lot of unknowns about it. I would love it if they can find more specifics about the Thera-Earth collision. The moon's mantle should have some answers, or it could surprise us. Who knows?

I'm having trouble finding a Mercator-projected map of the Moon to compare to the GRAIL map. Does anybody know a digital one?

You could go here:

http://www.lpi.usra.edu/resources/mapcatalog/usgsTopo/

or other pages from this list:

http://www.lpi.usra.edu/resources/mapcatalog/

But Mercator is not used very much these days as you know.

One other option would be to make your own here:

http://www.mapaplanet.org/explorer/moon.html

Mercator is one of the options under Advanced Options. Choose the data set you want, set the projection and resolution you want... and the lat-long extent. Warning, for Mercator don't choose 90 north to 90 south (it would be infinitely large), but the GRAIL maps are cut off at about 70 N and S.

Phil

Ah, I'd completely forgotten I could set the projection in map-a-planet. Thanks for the reminder.

Do you know why the lunar folks seem to like Mercator projection so much?

It allows craters at mid- to high-latitudes to appear circular. Almost all traditional lunar sheet maps from ACIC, USGS etc. used conformal projections (Mercator, conformal conic, polar stereographic) with that special characteristic. Only with the advent of digital mapping have non-conformal (read: shape-distorting) projections like Simple Cylindrical (Equirectangular) or [shudder] Sinusoidal been used to any extent.

Phil

GRAIL talk starting pretty quick:
http://www.ustream.tv/nasajpl2

"NASA will host a media teleconference at 10:30 a.m. PST (1:30 p.m. EST) Thursday, Dec. 13, to provide an overview of events leading up to twin spacecraft being commanded to impact the moon's surface on Dec. 17 at approximately 2:28 p.m. PST (5:28 p.m. EST). "


Phil

Emily's discussion of the GRAIL results is top knotch:
http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakda...il-results.html

Indeed it is; world-class real science explanation, as per her usual.

So that's what happens when you give a talented planetary geologist a computer with word processing capability...

Just a reminder

UPCOMING EVENT: NASA Moon Mission News
10:30 a.m. PST (13:30 EST) Thursday, Dec. 13 (18:30 UTC)
LINK http://www.ustream.tv/nasajpl2

NASA will host a media teleconference
to provide an overview of events leading up to twin spacecraft
being commanded to impact the moon's surface on Dec. 17 at
approximately 14:28 PST, (17:28 EST). (22:28 UTC)

NASA's Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) mission, whose two washing machine-sized probes were named Ebb and Flow by elementary school students in Bozeman, Mont., via a nationwide contest, have successfully completed their prime missions and have only days to go on their extended mission science collection. As planned, the duo is running low on fuel. They have been orbiting the moon since New Year's Eve and New Year's Day, respectively, giving scientists unprecedented detail about the moon's internal structure and composition.

from images of today's teleconf, the two spacecraft will hit an unnamed mountain 75 degrees north on monday evening (UTC)
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/grail/ne...on20121213.html

Had no idea they 'caught' LRO up to now. Fascinating!

The scattered fragments will be the most northerly artifacts on the lunar surface, for a while.

Phil

And speaking of locations... on the posted graphic the longitude is given as 26.63 degrees East. Oops - it's West! Yes, west of the prime meridian. You could call it 333.37 E if you prefer. Maybe that wacky lunar gravity is playing with the trajectory.

(I just noticed Emily has it right in her blog - well done!)


Phil

On the other side of the quality scale from Emily's fantastic work we have this from The Grauniad: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/dec...issance-orbiter

Someone alert the Planetary Protection Officer!

Let's hope they splash down safely!

Grauniad - that takes me back.

Phil

I read the article and couldn't see any major problems. However, when I got to the bottom there was an announcement.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/dec...issance-orbiter

"This article was amended on 14 December to amend the subheading,
which originally said the probes would "splash down" on the moon. The photograph
was also changed; the original showed Saturn's moon Enceladus."

Rocket burn complete, according to JPL.

Coverage starts at 2:00 PST.

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2012-398b

I made animation of last flight of Ebb and Flow.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDf5YsMvpJQ&hd=1

Live broadcast on NASA TV now.
http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/index.html

EDIT: Just a quick (from work) banner.

That cross-section chart updating every couple seconds is so cool. Minute left...

And it's done. Goodnight, grail. It's up to LRO to see what it can see when the sun comes up....

Final resting place for Grail A&B is now named in honor of "Sally Ride".
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2012-401

Click to view attachment

This was probably the most exciting moon mission possible next to a sample return or human landing.

Congratulations GRAIL! You've made history.

And two new holes in the ground at that

Just a final contribution...
Thank you GRAIL.

Click to view attachment

Ebb, one of the GRAIL spacecraft, made some final images from very low orbit which can be seen here:

http://images.moonkam.ucsd.edu/v/ebbs_last_images/

Phil

Any news from LRO? I see nothing on the main website or camera's individual site. We're past full moon by now.

Even if they do have an image, which they might not, I'm not surprised to see nothing right now. It's New Year's Eve, and last week was a holiday. NASA won't release something when they don't expect anybody will be paying attention.

Lol, that depends who you work for, last week was a 2 day break......Also I worked New Years eve too, as I am sure millions of us did.

One other point - LRO is in a higher orbit now so the small GRAIL craters will be very small in the images. It may be easier to locate them if the new images have illumination very similar to the older ones. That could take months to arrange. So I expect they will take images every time they are over the mountain, but any announcement might take longer.

Phil

Moreover - just because a site is in sunlight doesn't mean LRO is going to be over it quickly - the groundtrack of the orbit has to be taken into consideration also and it might be several cycles ( lunar days ) before a good view is available.

Final (or nearly final, not sure yet) video from GRAIL, three days before impact:


http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/video/index.php?id=1181



Phil

I found it interesting to realize that the 10km altitude of that video above the moon is about the same altitude as jet planes fly above Earth.

As far as I know - those were the last frames taken by MoonKAM - I got the raw frames from Sally Ride Science last week ( although they've been on their website for a while ) and just did a bit of deinterlacing and rotating to get the best I could out of them.

Thoroughly impressed by the MoonKam project as an education tool.
Throughout 2012 I did as much as possible to encourage students to give it a try.

Wonderful to see those final frames blended into such a great film. Nice job Doug.

Can't wait to see the results from the JunoCam project in 2016.

Few weeks ago I did two animations from those images, but I was too lazy to finish my blog entry about them .
Faster version (timewarp 5×) is available here.
Slow (~realtime) version is available here.
My animations are without some images in the beginning of the NASA's video, because they weren't published (yet?).

.

Note that there is no hardware commonality between MoonKAM and Junocam.

And you won't have to wait until 2016; the Juno Earth flyby is happening this year (9 October).

Is it too late to send a message to Grail telling it to turn it's phone horizontal?

The cameras were bolted to the spacecraft in that orientation probably about two years ago - and now lay smashed on the lunar surface.

I'm going to say yes...it's a bit too late.

Yes, we know -- it was a joke.

Here's an updated version of my Nearside Moon map with the GRAIL impacts added.

Phil

Click to view attachment

Is this farside map of yours still current? Trying to make sure I have a matched set

Yes it is - no more farside impacts. Incidentally, Chandrayaan-1 was predicted to impact in 2012 as its orbit evolved, but as it was not tracked or trackable we don't know where it fell.

Phil

LROC spots craters formed by GRAIL probes (sorry I couldn't find the original paper in the conference abstracts):

http://science.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/03/1...oon-probes?lite

Wow. LROC is an impressive instrument indeed, and their science team is getting very good at this sort of thing. Well done!!!

There is no abstract, this was a press conference, not a paper. It's cool to see this even with LRO in its higher orbit.

Phil

Better images and text at the NASA/LROC site:

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/LRO/news...il-results.html