FOUR decades after Russian and US spacecraft started exploring the moon, the European Space Agency has launched its first lunar mission. But SMART-1 is not in a hurry. The tiny craft, which launched last weekend, is making the slowest ever trip to the moon, taking 15 months to arrive, compared with the five-day journeys of NASA’s Apollo missions in the 1960s and 70s.
The Europeans have been able to take advantage of the lunar knowledge already gathered by NASA to plan the £77 million project, which is part of ESA’s programme of “smaller, faster, smarter” missions – in pointed contrast…
