NASA's Twin Moon Probes To Land This Weekend

Grail spacecraft will map the lunar gravity field in unprecedented detail

A pair of NASA spacecraft is getting set to orbit the moon this weekend, a move that will kick off the probes' effort to study Earth's nearest neighbor from crust to core.

NASA's twin Grail spacecraft are slated to start circling the moon one day apart, with Grail-A arriving on Saturday and Grail-B following on Sunday. The two probes will then fly around the moon in tandem, mapping the lunar gravity field in unprecedented detail and helping scientists better understand how the moon formed and evolved.

"This mission will rewrite the textbooks on the evolution of the moon," Grail principal investigator Maria Zuber, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said in a statement.

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