NASA "Grail" Probes to Reach Destination on New Year's Day
Monday, December 26, 2011
By: Tom Parkinson

Dec 26, 2011 | WMFE - The two unmanned space probes that took off from Cape Canaveral in September are due to slip into orbit around the moon over the New Year's weekend.

The twin spaceships are named Grail-A and Grail-B. Grail-A will enter the moon’s orbit on New Year’s Eve, Grail-B will follow on New Year’s Day. Once in orbit, the pair will spend two months following each other around the moon. Scientists back on Earth will measure the varying distance between the 2 ships to calculate the lunar gravity field.
A trip to the moon is usually a relatively short space journey. NASA’s Apollo missions landed on the planet in about 3 days but the Grail probes were launched using a much smaller, less expensive rocket. That's why it's taken 3 1/2 months for the two to travel there independently.
NASA expects the nearly 500 million dollar mission to yield a bounty of new information about the moon.