We May Be Able To See It, Too!

If you have a decent telescope -- or maybe even a powerful pair of binoclears -- watch the moon this weekend. That's when the ESA's SMART-1 probe will intentionally crash on the lunar surface and, if the impact is bright enough, you might be able to see it from your own back yard.

SMART-1 has spent the past three years or so taking thousands of photographs of the moon... mapping mineral deposits and finding what scientists call a "Peak of Eternal Light" -- a place near the Moon's north pole that's exposed to daylight all year long. That might just be a great place to build a solar-powered moon base.

Now, more than three years into its mission... SMART-1's innovative European-built ion engine is running out of fuel. So the ESA plans to crash the vehicle into the moon in such a way that it'll be visible from Earth.

"We'll be watching," says Bill Cooke, the head of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. "Measuring the brightness of SMART-1's impact is important to our research."

You should see it, starting at 10:41 pm PDT Saturday night. But here's the rub... The angle of descent is so shallow, that scientists aren't exactly sure when it'll hit. So they've drawn a ten-hour long window... and a rather wide area where SMART-1 will pack it in.

FMI: www.esa.int/SPECIALS/SMART-1/index.html