Moon Orbiters Dubbed 'Ebb' and Flow'

摘要

Smash a (retroactive) champagne bottle on them. On 17 January, NASA's twin spacecraft-formerly dubbed Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory, or GRAIL A and B-were officially christened Ebb and Flow. The monikers come thanks to Nina DiMauro's fourth-grade class at Emily Dickinson Elementary School in Bozeman, Montana, which wrote the winning essay in a contest to name the orbiters. If Ebb and Flow bring to mind the lunar pull on the tides, that's the point: DiMauro's pupils noted that they wanted to evoke the moon's most noticeable effect on Earth. "GRAIL-A and GRAIL-B are on a journey just like the moon is on a journey around the Earth," they wrote. The Bozeman students beat out nearly 900 other classrooms across the country to name the probes, which launched last September and will begin their scientific mission in March.