London - Europe has a proud moment to announce its first mission to the Moon. It has entered the orbit of the Moon. The spacecraft is SMART-1, an unmanned flight, driven by solar energy. The purpose of this mission is that it will collect a range of data including Moon's origin.

To site the background of Europe’s lunar mission, SMART-1, the European Space Agency (ESA) from Kourou (French Guiana) had launched their first lunar spacecraft, SMART-1, on 27 September 2003.

According to EurActiv, an efficient engine using an exploratory technique has been explored successfully. The spacecraft entered the orbit around the Moon on 15 November 2004, two months earlier than scheduled. The spacecraft will orbit the Moon for two years.

SMART-1 is the first of ESA's 'Small Missions for Advanced Research in Technology' (SMART), which are low-budget missions testing new technologies for bigger projects. The main purpose of SMART-1 is to test a new way to travel in space. It is ten times more efficient than the usual systems used so far.

This new way, solar-electric propulsion, does not burn fuel as chemical rockets do. It converts sunlight into electricity via solar panels. If this method proves to be successful, it may push ESA missions further away into deep space, because more energy-efficient spacecraft can make longer journeys.

SMART-1 is carrying a set of miniaturized instruments, which it will, once in the Moon, use to study the chemical composition of the lunar surface. It will also look, for the first time, at the darker side of the Moon's South Pole and help scientists find out whether ice is present on the Moon's surface. If ice was found on the Moon it would, as a vital resource, help in the setting up of a manned lunar base.