GRAIL Impact Site on Moon Named for Astronaut Sally K. Ride

On Monday of this week, NASA scientists gave the command for the Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) mission spacecraft to end their service by crashing into the lunar surface. The agency announced recently that the impact site on the Moon where twin spacecraft crashed have been named in honor of the late astronaut Sally K. Ride – America’s first woman in space and a member of the mission team.

“Sally was all about getting the job done, whether it be in exploring space, inspiring the next generation, or helping make the GRAIL mission the resounding success it is today,” said GRAIL principal investigator Maria Zuber of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. “As we complete our lunar mission, we are proud we can honor Sally Ride’s contributions by naming this corner of the moon after her.”

Impacting on a mountain near the moon’s north pole, the GRAIL spacecraft crashed into the Moon’s surface at 2:28:51 p.m. PST (5:28:51 p.m. EST) and 2:29:21 p.m. PST (5:29:21 p.m. EST). According to NASA the spacecraft were traveling at a speed of 3,760 mph (1.7 kilometers per second) when they hit the lunar surface at what is now known as the Sally K. Ride Impact Site, located on the southern face of an approximately 1.5-mile-tall (2.5-kilometer) mountain near a crater named Goldschmidt.

Ride passed away this past July after a 17-month battle with pancreatic cancer. As a member of the GRAIL mission team, Ride led GRAIL’s MoonKAM (Moon Knowledge Acquired by Middle School Students) Program through her company, Sally Ride Science, in San Diego.

In addition to the science instruments on board the spacecraft, they also each carried a MoonKAM camera. These cameras reportedly that took more than 115,000 total images of the lunar surface. The targest for these images had been proposed by middle school students from across the country and the resulting images returned for them to study. Even the names of the spacecraft “Ebb” and “Flow” were selected by Ride and the mission team from student submissions in a nationwide contest.

“Sally Ride worked tirelessly throughout her life to remind all of us, especially girls, to keep questioning and learning,” said Sen. Barbara Mikulski of Maryland. “Today her passion for making students part of NASA’s science is honored by naming the impact site for her.”

“We will miss our lunar twins, but the scientists tell me it will take years to analyze all the great data they got, and that is why we came to the moon in the first place,” said GRAIL project manager David Lehman of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. “So long, Ebb and Flow, and we thank you.”