A robotic U.S. spacecraft ended a pioneering mission to map dust and gases around the moon with a planned, kamikaze crash into the lunar surface early on Friday, Reuters cited NASA officials as saying. The Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer, or LADEE, had been flying at increasingly lower altitudes to study how dust is lifted off the lunar surface and what gases comprise the moon's so-called exosphere - the region of space surrounding the airless moon. NASA officials had planned to crash the spacecraft into the moon, after it transmitted its final batch of data. Before hitting the lunar surface, LADEE was traveling at 3,600 mph (5,790 kph), three times faster than a high-powered rifle bullet, so the spacecraft not only broke apart upon impact, but pieces of it likely vaporized. 'There's nothing gentle about impact at these speeds,' lead scientist Rick Elphic, with NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, said in a statement. Launched on Sept. 6 from Wallops Island, Virginia,, LADEE put itself into orbit around the moon in October. After an instrument checkout and adjustments to its altitude, LADEE in November began what was originally expected to be a 100-day mission. The mission was later extended to April 21, but LADEE ran out of fuel and came down somewhere on the far side of the moon between 12:30 a.m. and 1:22 a.m. EDT (1630 and 1722 GMT) on Friday, NASA said.
