GRAIL hunt

摘要

If ebb and Flow do not sound like the sorts of names that scientists at nasa would give to their space probes, that is because they are not. The two probes started off as "grail a" and "grail b", but were renamed by a class of schoolchildren in Bozeman, Montana, who thus won a competition run by America's space agency to give the craft more resonant monikers than the original. Sadly, Ebb and Flow are no more. Ebb expired at 22:28:51 Greenwich Mean Time on December 17th and Flow at 22:29:21. Their mission over, nasa deliberately crashed them into a lunar mountainside. But the first results of that mission, the Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory to give its name in full, were published a few days before the crafts' demise.