London - Europe’s first lunar spacecraft SMART-1 is set to move into orbit around the Moon on Monday the 15 November 2004. The craft has already reached the “gateway” of the Moon, the area where from its gravity dominates the Earth.

It shall be fired on the night of 15 November, where from it shall start maneuvering and shall orbit around the Moon. “For the first time, Europe has a mission which is now at the fuzzy boundary between the Earth and the Moon,” said Bernard Foing, Chief Scientist at the European Space Agency (ESA), at a briefing in London on Thursday.

According to NewScientist.com, once the craft has spiraled down to reach its final close orbit in January 2005, scientific investigations will begin. One goal is to survey the Peak of Eternal Light, a mountaintop bathed in permanent sunlight that keeps the temperature at a tolerable -20ºC, making it a favored site for a manned lunar base.

The bright sunshine could provide astronauts with solar power, and there might be plenty of useful water in craters nearby. “The south pole is probably the place where we’re going to start,” says Manuel Grande of the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory near Didcot in Oxfordshire, UK, who is leader scientist for the craft’s X-ray spectrometer.

SMART-1 was launched in September 2003 and is the first of a series of low-budget ESA projects called Small Missions for Advanced Research in Technology, which will test new technologies for bigger projects.