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GRAIL-A Enters Lunar Orbit
NASA's twin-craft GRAIL mission, launched way back in September (more information here), has successfully reached its destination. Grail-A has now entered lunar orbit; GRAIL-B is expected to enter lunar orbit tomorrow.
> You're a little off, Grail-A is Canadian, not European.
How did you get modded up to +4 for that? Grail-A and B are American, not Canadian. Built by Lockheed Martin, a US company, in the US (Denver, specifically), and launched by NASA.
Nothing against Canada, I love the place, but Grail is very much a US spacecraft.
It's nuts that posts like that get modded up as "informative".
Oops. $400M for GRAIL. If it were $400B you might have a better point.
Just to clarify: NASA's budget itself hasn't declined much at all since ~1970, only as a percentage of the total Federal budget. It has remained fairly steady at around 15 billion (with a significant dip at the late 1970-early 1980 period to around 11 billion.) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA#Annual_budget.2C_1958-2011
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
Why it took them so long to reach the Moon? Lunar transfer takes 3 days. Does anyone know?
Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory:
Unlike the Apollo program missions, which took three days to reach the Moon, GRAIL will make use of a three- to four-month low-energy trans-lunar cruise via the Sun-Earth Lagrange point L1 to reduce fuel requirements, protect instruments and reduce the velocity of the two spacecraft at lunar arrival to help achieve the extremely low 50 km (31 mi) orbits with separation between the spacecraft (arriving 24 hours apart) of 175 to 225 km (109 to 140 mi)
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