Japan aerospace agency JAXA’s lunar orbiter probe Kaguya (formerly SELENE) is all set to impact the surface of the moon on June 11, thursday, completing its two year long mission with a daunting final task of impact landing on moon’s southern hemisphere near the Gill crater (shown in pic).

Kaguya is set to crash into the moon at a lunar latitude of 63° south and longitude of 80° east. Its projected impact site is circled in red in this mosaic of images taken by Europe’s SMART-1 spacecraft, which itself smashed into the moon at the end of its mission in 2006

The mission is to seek and shed light on the formation and evolution of the moon by studying its composition, gravitational field and surface characteristics. Kaguya deployed two smaller satellites (’Baby Probes’) after reaching lunar orbit that allowed it to relay data to Earth while it was on the moon’s far side and to better measure anomalies in the moon’s gravitational field.

Kaguya has its own ‘firsts’ too. The gravity field mapping of the far side of the moon and also of making the first HD video of the lunar surface.

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