Scientists successfully activated four attitude control engines on Chang’e-2 and sent the satellite into the orbit with a perilune of just 15 kilometer above the moon, according to a flight control official in Beijing. It will photograph the Bay of Rainbows region with its CCD cameras from Wednesday, according to the center.
NASA has revived 2 satellites that were dying and sent them to the moon creating the ARTEMIS mission:
A pair of NASA spacecraft that were supposed to be dead a year ago are instead flying to the Moon for a breakthrough mission in lunar orbit. “Their real names are THEMIS P1 and P2, but I call them ‘dead spacecraft walking,'” says Vassilis Angelopoulos of UCLA, principal investigator of the THEMIS mission. “Not so long ago, we thought they were goners. Now they are beginning a whole new adventure.”
The story begins in 2007 when NASA launched a fleet of five spacecraft into Earth’s magnetosphere to study the physics of geomagnetic storms. Collectively, they were called THEMIS, short for “Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions during Substorms.” P1 and P2 were the outermost members of the quintet. Working together, the probes quickly discovered a cornucopia of previously unknown phenomena such as colliding auroras, magnetic spacequakes, and plasma bullets shooting up and down Earth’s magnetic tail. These findings allowed researchers to solve several longstanding mysteries of the Northern Lights.
The mission was going splendidly, except for one thing: Occasionally, P1 and P2 would pass through the shadow of Earth. The solar powered spacecraft were designed to go without sunlight for as much as three hours at a time, so a small amount of shadowing was no problem. But as the mission wore on, their orbits evolved and by 2009 the pair was spending as much as 8 hours a day in the dark. “The two spacecraft were running out of power and freezing to death,” says Angelopoulos. “We had to do something to save them.”
Because the mission had gone so well, the spacecraft still had an ample supply of fuel–enough to go to the Moon. “We could do some great science from lunar orbit,” he says. NASA approved the trip and in late 2009, P1 and P2 headed away from the shadows of Earth.
With a new destination, the mission needed a new name. The team selected ARTEMIS, the Greek goddess of the Moon. It also stands for “Acceleration, Reconnection, Turbulence and Electrodynamics of the Moon’s Interaction with the Sun.”
The first big events of the ARTEMIS mission are underway now. On August 25, 2010, ARTEMIS-P1 reached the L2 Lagrange point on the far side of the Moon. Following close behind, ARTEMIS-P2 entered the opposite L1 Lagrange point on Oct. 22nd. Lagrange points are places where the gravity of Earth and Moon balance, creating a sort of gravitational parking spot for spacecraft.
The ARTEMIS spacecraft are currently located at the L1 and L2 Earth-Moon Lagrange points: NASA
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2010/27oct_artemis/
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