Today in History – September 27, 2003 – The first European mission to the moon was launched aboard an Ariane-5 rocket carrying the SMART-1 exploration probe, along with two commercial satellites. It took 15 months to reach lunar orbit, covered over 60 million miles with only 13 gallons of fuel. After being captured by lunar gravity in November 2004, the 170-lb probe scanned the Moon for over 30 months to gain more information about the chemical composition of the Moon and whether it contains water. Powered by a revolutionary new “ion drive”, a solar-powered engine, its cost was only £70 million, much less expensive than that of U.S. space missions. The SMART-1 crashed into lunar soil in September 2006 at the end of its successful mission. The image in the upper right is an artist’s impression of the trajectory of the SMART-1 spacecraft in the final phase of its mission.
Interested readings may want to read Arianne Agogino Gieringer’s blog of December 24 on the first Ariane rocket launch. As she points out, the Ariane rocket continues to be one of the premier commercial satellite launching systems in the world today.
For more information, see the Engineering Pathway‘s resources on the SMART-1 mission, rockets and aerospace engineering. For curricular resources, visit the Aerospace Engineering Education community site.
Also on this date in history in 1816, the first Stirling engine is patented. And in 1910 a key patent is issued for the production of ammonia by Frtiz Haber and Robert Le Rossingnol.
This patent could produce ammonia on a large scale directly from its component gases of hydrogen and nitrogen. Fritz Haber (right photo above) went on to win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for this invention in 1918.