By Xinhua
Washington : NASA will launch a new mission that will peer deep inside the moon to reveal its anatomy and history, announced Alan Stern, the agency’s Associate Administrator for Science, in a press release on Tuesday.
The name of the new moon mission is “Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory,” or GRAIL. It will cost 375 million U.S. dollars and is scheduled to launch in 2011, according to the announcement.
GRAIL will fly twin spacecraft in tandem orbits around the moon for several months to measure its gravity field in unprecedented detail. The mission also will answer long-standing questions about Earth’s moon and provide scientists a better understanding of how Earth and other rocky planets in the solar system formed.
Scientists will use the gravity field information from the two satellites to X-ray the moon from crust to core to reveal the moon’s subsurface structures and, indirectly, its thermal history.
GRAIL will support NASA’s exploration goals as the agency vows to return humans to the moon by 2020. In 2008, the agency will launch the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, or LRO, to circle the moon for at least a year and take measurements to identify future robotic and human landing sites.