These are NASA’s GRAIL twin spacecraft’s final videos before crashing. Ebb and Flow—as the spacecraft’s were affectionately known at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory—turned on their video cameras for one last time three days before impact. The footage is truly beautiful.
The GRAIL mission were intentionally crashed because they didn’t have enough fuel to keep flying over the Moon after successfully completing their mission: create a high-resolution gravity field map of the Moon. According to NASA, “the map will provide a better understanding of how Earth and other rocky planets in the solar system formed and evolved.” [JPL YouTube]
