The spaceship Kaguya crashed on the moon

The area where the Japanese spacecraft crashed is a plateau full of ancient craters * Observers with amateur telescopes could view the debris plume from the crash at the southern end of the moon as seen from Earth

As the Americans prepare to launch next week's double probe to the moon LRO/LCROSS, the Japanese space agency's Kaguya operation is coming to an end.

Yesterday at 21:30 Israel time, the Japanese space agency crashed the Kaguya spacecraft into the lunar surface. To make it convenient to observe the impact, the agency directed the operation to the area on the bright side of the moon (80 degrees East, 64 degrees South), and at the hours when the event could be observed using telescopes from Australia to Western Asia.

The area where the Japanese spacecraft was destroyed is a plateau full of ancient craters.

Among the achievements of the spacecraft is a video from the beginning of 2009 in which the Earth is seen causing a solar eclipse as the phenomenon is seen from the Moon. The spacecraft also provided fresh data on the composition of the far, mysterious side of the moon.

Observers with amateur telescopes could view the debris plume from the crash at the south end of the Moon as seen from Earth.

The scientists hope to learn something about the composition of the moon by analyzing the observations of the fragments that have flown by. They are also going to compare the images of the area as taken by the European SMART-1 spacecraft that circled the moon one year ago and mapped large parts of it, to the series of images that will be taken by other spacecraft after the crash (currently it is a Chinese spacecraft, an Indian spacecraft and the American spacecraft that will be launched next week).

Bernard Poing, who at the time managed the SMART-1 project at the European Space Agency, said that he hopes that in the future it will be possible to photograph the fresh, elongated crater created by the impact of the Japanese spacecraft, as well as the fragments that flew as a result of the crash in order to analyze their composition.

The crash plume was photographed by the IRIS2 camera on the Anglo-Australian Telescope, a bright flash seen near the time the spacecraft crashed.