Europe's first trip to Moon ends with welcome bump

It was the slowest and possibly the cheapest trip to the Moon, yet Europe's first lunar mission has ended as planned with a spectacular crash landing.

The Smart-1 spacecraft had been carefully manoeuvred so that yesterday at 6.42am it would hit the lunar surface at a speed of about 4,500mph in a region of the Moon known as the Lake of Excellence.

Scientists at the European Space Agency's operations centre in Darmstadt, Germany, pronounced the crash landing a complete success and said the impact would help to reveal the origins of the Moon and whether it was ever part of the Earth.

Professional and amateur astronomers as far apart as South Africa and Hawaii had trained their telescopes on the crash site in the hope of seeing the flash of light as the spacecraft hit the surface of Earth's only natural satellite.

Spectroscopic measurements of the lunar dust thrown up by the impact could help scientists to determine the precise chemical composition of this region of the Moon - and so shed further light on its origins. "I was really surprised as the flash was very impressive. I was betting on not seeing much," said Gerhard Schwehm, the mission manager of the Smart-1 programme.

The €110m (£74m) spacecraft took an agonising 14 months to reach the Moon because it was powered by a revolutionary ion-propulsion engine, which consumed just 60 litres of fuel - the lowest amount of fuel of any lunar mission.

After completing its stated task of extensively mapping the lunar surface, ESA scientists decided to extend the life of the spacecraft, which would otherwise have crash landed at random on the Moon more than six months ago.

They engineered Smart-1 into a series of decreasing elliptical orbits so that its final orbit would crash it into the Sea of Excellence, which is on the edge of the "terminator" shadow that marks the boundary between the lunar day and lunar night.

Bernard Foing, a project scientist, said this was planned so the light from the crash would be seen better against the dark background of the lunar night.

The Moon may have been created by the impact of a Mars-sized asteroid on the Earth 4,500 million years ago.

"The measurements of Smart-1 call into question the theories concerning the Moon's violent origin and evolution," Dr Foing said. "The huge wealth of Smart-1 data, to be analysed over the months and years to come, is a precious contribution to lunar science at a time when the exploration of the Moon is once again getting the world's interest.

"Smart-1 has mapped large and small impact craters, studied the volcanic and tectonic processes that shaped the Moon, and unveiled the mysterious poles, and investigated sites for future exploration," he said.

Smart-1 was launched on 27 September 2003 and was captured by the Moon's gravity in November 2004 after a journey that took it on a long, spiralling trajectory around the Earth. It started its scientific survey of the lunar surface in March 2005 with a series of instruments, such as an X-ray telescope built by the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire, an infrared spectrometer and a miniaturised camera.

"I feel a bit sad that my baby has landed in quite a rough manner but the collision was safe," Dr Foing said. "We don't expect any ejecta from the crash to reach Earth."