Lunar Heritage Sites and GRAIL's Final Mile

This graphic highlights locations on the moon NASA considers "lunar heritage sites" and the path NASA's Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory spacecraft will take on their final flight. Navigators on the GRAIL team have designed an end of mission plan that rules out the extremely remote possibility of either of the two GRAIL spacecraft impacting near any of these historic locations. The Apollo 11, 12, 14, 16 and 17 landing sites are indicated with green circles. The Surveyor sites are indicated with yellow squares. The Soviet Union's Luna and Lunakhod landing sites are indicated with red diamonds and red triangles, respectively. The ground tracks for the Ebb and Flow spacecraft during their final half-orbits are shown in blue and red. The maps are color-coded by topography. Red and white indicate the high areas. Blue and violet indicate low areas. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech