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Europlanet : Great spectrometer - but you broke my laser!

Doug Ellison

Written by Doug Ellison
Founder, unmannedspaceflight.com
August 22, 2007

by Doug Ellison in Potsdam

Mark was followed by Bernard Foing - whose colleague Pascale Ehrenfreund spoke about the SMART-1 impact last year in Valencia. Not much new information, but a few extra little snippets of data. The last full frame of data from SMART-1 was received at 05:42:21.759 on the morning of September 3, 2006. However a radio observatory in Australia continued to recieve a signal until 05:42:22.394076. That's a very accurate timing which constrains the impact point along the trajectory down to plus or minus 2 centimeters.

Smart 1 impact flash

Smart 1 impact flash
This contour map of the flash, so bright that it is saturated, shows that the North (top) and South (bottom) of the flash are not identical. There is a clear elongation on the South side in the direction of the motion. The elongations at 45 degrees are due to the diffraction pattern from the secondary mirror supports (the spider). The units on the axes of the graph are WIRCam pixels: 0.3" or ~0.5km.

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