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Europe's moon mission blasts off
KOUROU, French Guiana -- Europe's first mission to the moon has successfully blasted off aboard an Ariane 5 rocket from French Guiana. The rocket, carrying the unmanned SMART-1 lunar exploration probe and two other commercial satellites, took off at 8.14 p.m. (2314 GMT) Saturday from the European Space Agency (ESA) launch centre at Kourou, on the northeast coast of South America. The probe was released into space 41 minutes after launch, beginning a 15-month journey before it reaches orbit around the moon. Once in position SMART, short for Small Missions for Advanced Research and Technology, will begin detailed mapping of the moon's surface, including the far side, which is never seen from Earth. It will also look for evidence of water on the moon and gather data on its chemical make up, possibly helping to answer the age-old question of how the moon came into existence. One theory is that Earth's nearest neighbor was created out of the debris from a devastating collision between the Earth and a Mars-sized body about four and a half billion years ago. "There are many unsolved questions about the Moon, even though six NASA Apollo missions and three unmanned Soviet spacecraft have landed on it and brought back rock samples," ESA's SMART-1 Project Scientist Bernard Foing said. "The far side of the Moon -- the one that never faces Earth-- and the Polar Regions remain fairly unexplored. The existence of water on the Moon has also never been confirmed." Ion driveOn its way to the moon SMART's primary objective is to test an innovative propulsion system known as an ion drive. The system uses solar power to produce a beam of charged xenon atoms, or ions, which are expelled from the back of the probe producing thrust that drives the spacecraft forward. To power the drive SMART-1 is carrying just 60 liters (about 15.8 U.S. gallons) of fuel for a journey of 100 million kilometers (62 million miles). In automotive terms that converts to an enviably efficient fuel consumption rate of 3,911,671 miles per U.S. gallon -- the average American family car consumes somewhere in the region of 30 miles per gallon. If successful scientists hope the ion drive will pave the way to lighter and hence cheaper means of exploring deep space. SMART-1 itself is a relatively low budget mission in space terms, having cost just 110 million euros ($126 million). That's about a fifth of the cost of previous large-scale ESA space missions. Much of the cost saving came from using miniaturization of key components, producing a lighter spacecraft weighing 370 kilograms (815 lb) and measuring just one meter across.
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