NASA's Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) spacecraft has reached the end of its mission.
According to the Associated Press, the lunar probe unexpectedly survived this week's eclipse and will plummet toward the moon's surface. NASA project managers expect it will vaporize once it hits the moon since it is falling at speeds well over 3,000 mph.
"It's bound to make a dent," project scientist Rick Elphic told the AP Thursday.
By Thursday evening, NASA estimated LADEE was 300 feet above the lunar surface. NASA intentionally lowered LADEE's altitude ahead of the lunar eclipse so it would crash to the surface by Monday.
"At the time of impact, LADEE was traveling at a speed of 3,600 miles per hour - about three times the speed of a high-powered rifle bullet," Elphic said in a statement from NASA released Friday morning. "There's nothing gentle about impact at these speeds - it's just a question of whether LADEE made a localized craterlet on a hillside or scattered debris across a flat area. It will be interesting to see what kind of feature LADEE has created."
Launched in Sept., LADEE was given a 100-day science mission and this past month it was working beyond what its project managers intended. They also expected the opposite side of the moon during its eclipse to create conditions too harsh for the probe to survive.
"Each orbit could be the last one and you don't know. It's kind of a crapshoot," Hine told the AP hours before the early Friday morning crash. "So I'd say everybody's in good spirits, but there's that uncertainty. Is it going to happen next hour or three hours from now or are we going to make it all the way through Sunday?"
According to Space.com, LADEE's mission was a success and the craft obtained plenty of data on the strange dust on the moon's surface. When astronauts first walked on the moon, they reported lunar dust sticking to their spacesuits as well as seeing a strange glow on the moon's horizon.
Mihály Horányi, Lunar Dust Experiment principal investigator, said the data LADEE gathered will be more than enough to report groundbreaking discoveries of the moon.
"Discovering this cloud... it opens up a whole new avenue to do planetary science," he told Space.com. "If you are worried about safety, you better learn about these big particles."
