Forty-four years after the Soviet Union first crashed a spacecraft there, and 34 years after two Americans left the first human footprints, Europeans are finally taking aim at the moon.
After a series of delays, the European Space Agency is hoping to launch its SMART-1 spacecraft toward the moon Sunday evening from the European Spaceport in French Guiana, on the north coast of South America.
Although the ESA has long been involved in manned and unmanned orbital missions, and has a robot spacecraft bound for Mars, this will be the first European mission to the moon.
The 770-pound spacecraft will be fired into orbit just after dark Sunday, hitchhiking with two commercial satellites atop an Ariane-5 rocket. (The Ariane rockets are built by Arianespace, which is owned by banks and aerospace industries in 12 European countries (three-quarters in France and Germany).
SMART-1 will then set off for the moon, the first spacecraft to attempt the journey since NASA's Lunar Prospector orbited the moon in 1998.
The $111 million effort is designed to explore the moon's mineral composition and to test a variety of new spacecraft technologies.
Even after decades of lunar research, there's still plenty the moon can teach us, says Bernard H. Foing, the ESA's chief of research and scientific support.
"We have very rich information from areas sampled by the Apollo missions. But those areas were near the [moon's] equator, and all on the near side," he says. "They're not representative of the whole moon.
"We need to have the global composition of the moon to understand the origin of the moon better," Foing says.
Powered by an ion-drive engine, SMART-1 (for Small Mission for Advanced Research in Technology) will follow a circuitous but fuel-efficient route, reaching the moon early in 2005.
There, from an orbit dipping as near as 186 miles above the moon's surface, it will send back what scientists hope will be a wealth of lunar data.
Researchers from Britain, Germany, Finland, Italy, Sweden and Switzerland have loaded SMART-1 with 33 pounds of miniaturized instruments.
They include a color camera the size of a human eye; a 4.4-pound infrared spectrometer, and an 11-pound, toaster-sized X-ray spectrometer.
"We will try to use the moon as a time machine," Foing says.
`Well worth the effort'
