The European Space Agency (ESA) is Europe’s gateway to space. Its mission is to shape the development of Europe’s space capability and ensure that investment in space continues to deliver benefits to the citizens of Europe and the world.
Find out more about space activities in our 23 Member States, and understand how ESA works together with their national agencies, institutions and organisations.
Exploring our Solar System and unlocking the secrets of the Universe
Go to topicProtecting life and infrastructure on Earth and in orbit
Go to topicUsing space to benefit citizens and meet future challenges on Earth
Go to topicMaking space accessible and developing the technologies for the future
Go to topicThank you for liking
You have already liked this page, you can only like it once!
This image shows the location of the SMART-1 impact, as estimated by the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT).
To determine the location, the CFHT scientists used the position of the flash relative to a pair of reference craters visible as bright areas on the CFHT images, and a map of the Moon as seen from Mauna Kea at the time of the impact using the Moon Virtual Atlas. A simple triangulation allowed to pinpoint the impact area within a couple of kilometres.
The crash site determined from the CFHT observations is actually almost coinciding with the last ESA predictions before the impact. Courtesy of CFHT.