Dark Side of the Moon Is Where Spacecrafts Go to Die
- 10 years ago
NASA’s unmanned Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer, which cost around 280 million dollars to develop, recently crash landed into the far side of the moon traveling at 36 hundred miles per hour. Experts say that it probably vaporized upon impact, but it also joined a group of several spacecrafts that reached their final resting place on the dark side of the moon.
NASA’s unmanned Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer, which cost around 280 million dollars to develop, recently crash landed into the far side of the moon traveling at 36 hundred miles per hour.
Experts say that it probably vaporized upon impact, but it also joined a group of several spacecrafts that reached their final resting place on the dark side of the moon.
There are reportedly six known spacecrafts that have crashed into the moon, five of them are from the United States, and the other one is from Japan.
According to Philip Stooke, a space-mapping expert at the University of Western Ontario, there might also be several unconfirmed spacecrafts from India, Japan, and the former Soviet Union along with several other NASA missions from the US including hardware that was never accounted for from four Apollo missions.
The Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer was designed to make low-orbit passes and having completed its mission without enough fuel to escape the moon’s orbit, scientists at NASA crashed it on purpose.
The mission launched in September of last year, and made national headlines because a frog appeared flying through the air in the launch photos taken by a still camera with a sound trigger at the Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia.
NASA’s unmanned Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer, which cost around 280 million dollars to develop, recently crash landed into the far side of the moon traveling at 36 hundred miles per hour.
Experts say that it probably vaporized upon impact, but it also joined a group of several spacecrafts that reached their final resting place on the dark side of the moon.
There are reportedly six known spacecrafts that have crashed into the moon, five of them are from the United States, and the other one is from Japan.
According to Philip Stooke, a space-mapping expert at the University of Western Ontario, there might also be several unconfirmed spacecrafts from India, Japan, and the former Soviet Union along with several other NASA missions from the US including hardware that was never accounted for from four Apollo missions.
The Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer was designed to make low-orbit passes and having completed its mission without enough fuel to escape the moon’s orbit, scientists at NASA crashed it on purpose.
The mission launched in September of last year, and made national headlines because a frog appeared flying through the air in the launch photos taken by a still camera with a sound trigger at the Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia.