PIA16494: Lunar Heritage Sites and GRAIL's Final Mile
 Target Name:  Moon
 Is a satellite of:  Earth
 Mission:  GRAIL
 Spacecraft:  GRAIL
 Product Size:  1230 x 1242 pixels (w x h)
 Produced By:  JPL
 Full-Res TIFF:  PIA16494.tif (4.585 MB)
 Full-Res JPEG:  PIA16494.jpg (279 kB)

Click on the image above to download a moderately sized image in JPEG format (possibly reduced in size from original)

Original Caption Released with Image:

This graphic highlights locations on the moon NASA considers "lunar heritage sites" and the path NASA's Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory spacecraft will take on their final flight. Navigators on the GRAIL team have designed an end of mission plan that rules out the extremely remote possibility of either of the two GRAIL spacecraft impacting near any of these historic locations. The Apollo 11, 12, 14, 16 and 17 landing sites are indicated with green circles. The Surveyor sites are indicated with yellow squares. The Soviet Union's Luna and Lunakhod landing sites are indicated with red diamonds and red triangles, respectively.

The ground tracks for the Ebb and Flow spacecraft during their final half-orbits are shown in blue and red.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., manages the GRAIL mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, is home to the mission's principal investigator, Maria Zuber. GRAIL is part of the Discovery Program managed at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Denver built the spacecraft. The California Institute of Technology in Pasadena manages JPL for NASA.

For more information about GRAIL, please visit http://grail.nasa.gov.

Image Credit:
NASA/JPL-Caltech

Image Addition Date:
2012-12-13