Europe plans to go to Moon

[brian]

Well, it's undoubtedly going to be behind the Chinese mission plans for a trip to the moon - but the European Space Agency is slowly catching up.

Unlike the China, though, the ultimate goal of the ESA isn't a landing - but they do aim to provide a throrough mapping, and especially analysis the surface with X-Rays.

For some reason I also suspect that there will be less anxiety about the use of the Ion Engine here in Europe - which could certainly create some leeway for NASA ambitions.

Anyway, here's the article:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3159797.stm

High hopes for Euro Moon mission

A revolutionary new type of solar powered engine will be at the centre of Europe's first ever mission to the Moon, project leaders have announced.
They said the ion engines turn "science fiction into science fact" and will transform space travel by propelling craft at higher speeds over greater distances.

Once in orbit around the Earth's nearest neighbour the unmanned probe, called Smart 1, will use British technology to map the entire surface of the Moon for the first time.

It is hoped the mission will help form a better understanding of how the Moon was born and provide more information about its make-up.

On Monday morning the team behind the European Space Agency (Esa) probe said it would be launched on an Ariane 5 rocket on 4 September from Kourou in French Guiana.

But hours later it was announced that the date was being put back to help other teams using the rocket to launch their own satellites.

The ion engines have been used just once before, on a US space agency (Nasa) mission called Deep Space 1, and the Esa mission will provide an opportunity for further tests of the technology.

Solar panels provide power to the ion engine, which are believed to be capable of accelerating spacecraft to speeds greater than those possible with rocket engines.

Ion engines are also 10 times more efficient than rockets and could cut the time needed for interplanetary journeys.

Sir Patrick Moore said: "It is a pioneering method of propulsion, ion propulsion is a means of space travel for the future. This is a pioneering vessel, smart in every way."

After a leisurely 15 month journey to the Moon, the washing machine sized craft will be used to produce an X-ray map of the Moon in an attempt to discover precisely how it was made.

The technology to do that has been designed by scientists from the Universities of London, Sheffield and Manchester.

One idea behind the Moon's formation is that a Mars-sized object smashed into the juvenile Earth, flinging up debris which later merged to form the Moon.

If this actually happened, the Moon should contain less iron than the Earth, compared to lighter elements such as magnesium and aluminium.

By measuring the amounts of these chemical elements comprehensively for the first time, Smart 1 should provide the answer.

Professor Manuel Grande, a leading British scientist on the project, described the mission as "a lot of firsts rolled into one mission".

"This is the first European mission to the Moon, this is the first smaller, faster mission and this is the first solar-powered spacecraft," said the professor, of the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire.

The lunar probe had been due to leave Earth in March but its take-off was postponed following a failed rocket launch last December.

The incident led to a shake-up of the Ariane 5 rocket launcher programme, and several Esa space missions were put on hold.

[brian]

Hm, progress with the European Space Agency's mission is more advanced than I realised.

Seems lift off is set for September - and they're looking to search for possible future landing sites, to try and retrieve examples of moon mantle rock, for analysis. Now that should certainly help clarify the entire issue of where the moon came from. Although samples retrieved from the Apollo missions were interpretated to mean that the moon had formed from the earth after an impact, there are still inexplicable discrepencies between various isotopes across various solar system bodies - earth, the moon, mars, and various meteorite fragments.

Anyway, the European Space Agency mission:

http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99994065

Europe's Moon mission to scan giant crater

Europe's first mission to the Moon is set to scrutinise the largest crater in the Solar System, looking for a new type of Moon rock. It will also be on the lookout for landing sites so that a future robotic mission can bring samples home.

ESA's spacecraft, SMART-1 is due to launch on 3 September 2003. It will use X-rays and infrared light to map the composition of the whole Moon, including the 2000-kilometre-wide Aitken Basin. The basin sits over the Moon's south pole and was excavated billions of years ago by the impact of a giant asteroid or comet.

It is hoped the observations will give a glimpse of a never-before-seen type of Moon rock: the lunar mantle. The mantle rocks will help astronomers understand better how the Moon was formed and evolved, but sit beneath the lunar crust that was sampled by astronauts.

"To reach the mantle rocks you would normally have to drill through a few tens of kilometres of crustal rock," says Sarah Dunkin, at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, in Oxfordshire, UK. "In the Aitken Basin, however, we believe that a giant meteorite has done the drilling for us." The impact was so large that calculations suggest the object must have punched its way clean through the crust to hurl mantle rocks up onto the surface.

The Aitken Basin's location on the far side of the Moon means it was only recognised as an impact structure by NASA's Galileo spacecraft 1990. SMART-1 will be the first spaceprobe to conduct a rigorous scientific survey of this feature.

Its human-eye-sized camera will also map the Aitken Basin's topography in detail. This will help scout out potential landing sights for a robotic sample-return mission to be led by NASA some time around 2010.

SMART-1 is currently at Kourou, French Guiana, awaiting its launch on an Ariane-5 rocket. It will take 15 to 18 months to reach the Moon, via a spiral trajectory. It will be powered by ion engine - a new evolution of the technology pioneered on NASA's Deep Space 1, 1998.

SMART-1, conceived as a technology demonstrator for future spacecraft, is an all-new, miniaturised and lightweight spacecraft. It only needs an engine with a thrust equivalent to blowing on your hand, to waft it to the Moon and, at two kilograms, its infrared spectrometer is 10 times lighter than any previous instrument.

The mission will cost 110 million Euros, but David Southwood, director of science at ESA, says: "To do SMART-1 without all the new innovation would probably have cost half as much again." He sees SMART-1's tests as essential to a number of future ESA missions, including Bepi-Colombo, which will study Mercury, and Solar Orbiter, which will dive closer to the sun than any previous spacecraft.

[nemesis]

It is only 40 years after the Soviets and Americans. Better late than never.