Montana Students Pick Winning Names for Moon Craft

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JET PROPULSION LABORATORY
CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
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http://www.jpl.nasa.gov

DC Agle 818-393-9011
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
agle@jpl.nasa.gov

Dwayne Brown 202-358-1726
NASA Headquarters, Washington
dwayne.c.brown@nasa.gov

Whitney Lawrence Mullen 858-638-1432
Sally Ride Science, San Diego
wmullen@sallyridescience.com

News release: 2012-015 Jan. 17, 2012

Montana Students Pick Winning Names for Moon Craft

The full version of this story with accompanying images is at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2012-015&cid=release_2012-015

PASADENA, Calif. -- Twin NASA spacecraft that achieved orbit around the moon New Year's Eve and
New Year's Day have new names, thanks to elementary students in Bozeman, Mont. Their winning
entry, "Ebb and Flow," was selected as part of a nationwide school contest that began in October 2011.

The names were submitted by fourth graders from the Emily Dickinson Elementary School. Nearly 900
classrooms with more than 11,000 students from 45 states, Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia
participated in the contest. Previously named Gravity Recovery And Interior Laboratory, or GRAIL-A
and -B, the washing machine-sized spacecraft begin science operations in March, after a launch in
September 2011.

"The 28 students of Nina DiMauro's class at the Emily Dickinson Elementary School have really hit the
nail on the head," said Maria Zuber, GRAIL principal investigator from the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology in Cambridge, Mass. "We were really impressed that the students drew their inspiration by
researching GRAIL and its goal of measuring gravity. Ebb and Flow truly capture the spirit and
excitement of our mission."

Zuber and Sally Ride, America's first woman in space and CEO of Sally Ride Science in San Diego,
selected the names following the contest, which attracted 890 proposals via the Internet and mail. The
contest invited ideas from students ages 5 to 18 enrolled in U.S. schools. Although everything from
spelling and grammar to creativity was considered, Zuber and Ride primarily took into account the
quality of submitted essays.

"With submissions from all over the United States and even some from abroad, there were a lot of great
entries to review," Ride said. "This contest generated a great deal of excitement in classrooms across
America, and along with it an opportunity to use that excitement to teach science."

GRAIL is NASA's first planetary mission carrying instruments fully dedicated to education and public
outreach. Each spacecraft carries a small camera called GRAIL MoonKAM (Moon Knowledge
Acquired by Middle school students). Thousands of students in grades five through eight will select
target areas on the lunar surface and send requests for study to the GRAIL MoonKAM Mission
Operations Center in San Diego.

The winning prize for the Dickinson students is to choose the first camera images. Dickinson is one of
nearly 2,000 schools registered for the MoonKAM program, which is led by Ride and her team at Sally
Ride Science in collaboration with undergraduate students at the University of California in San Diego.

"These spacecraft represent not only great science, but great inspiration for our future," said Jim Green,
director of NASA's Planetary Science Division in Washington. "As they study our lunar neighbor, Ebb
and Flow will undergo nearly the same motion as the tides we feel here on Earth."

Launched in September 2011, Ebb and Flow will be placed in a near-polar, near-circular orbit with an
altitude of about 34 miles (55 kilometers). During their science mission, the duo will answer
longstanding questions about the moon and give scientists a better understanding of how Earth and other
rocky planets in the solar system formed.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., manages the GRAIL mission for NASA's
Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The GRAIL mission is part of the Discovery Program
managed at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. Lockheed Martin Space Systems
in Denver built the spacecraft. The California Institute of Technology in Pasadena manages JPL for
NASA.

To read the winning submission visit: https://moonkam.ucsd.edu/about/spacecraft_names . Information
about MoonKAM is available online at: https://moonkam.ucsd.edu . For more information about
GRAIL visit: http://www.nasa.gov/grail or http://grail.nasa.gov .

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