BERKELEY, Calif., June 29 (UPI) -- NASA says the first of two spacecraft that will study the moon is safely in its lunar orbit after successful maneuvers guided by flight engineers in California.
At 10:40 a.m. EDT Monday, controllers at the University of California, Berkeley, issued commands for the ARTEMIS P1 spacecraft to begin its move into orbit around the moon, a NASA release said.
The Acceleration, Reconnection, Turbulence and Electrodynamics of the Moon's Interaction with the Sun space probe arrived in orbit at 12:30 p.m. EDT Tuesday.
Engineers say they will move the second spacecraft, ARTEMIS P2, into position July 17.
ARTEMIS is the first mission ever to orbit at the moon's Lagrangian points -- points on either side of the moon where the moon and Earth's gravity balance perfectly.
The ARTEMIS mission uses two of the five spacecraft from another NASA constellation of satellites called THEMIS that were launched in 2007 and successfully completed their mission of studying the sun in 2010.
The ARTEMIS mission allowed two of the in-orbit spacecraft to be re-purposed to extend their usefulness, NASA said.
