Baku, January 18 (AZERTAC). This incredible video was taken from one of two Nasa probes which crash landed on the Moon last month as they made their final lunar orbits. Three days before it slammed it slammed into a mountainside, Nasa's Ebb spacecraft took this video as it hurtled 6 miles above the northern hemisphere of the Moon's far side. The video was recorded by the GRAIL mission's MoonKAM (Moon Knowledge Acquired by Middle School Students) which sent back images to U.S. schools as part of an outreach project. Flying in formation over the lunar surface, the two NASA probes - named Ebb and Flow - helped further our understanding of the early solar system. But last month, in a dramatic climax to their mission, the two spacecraft plunged seconds apart into a mountain near the moon's North Pole.

The first clip in the video was taken by Ebb's forward-facing camera and is made up of 931 individual frames. The second was taken from its rear camera and is comprised of 1498 frames.

After the crash landing on December 17, NASA said it had dedicated the impact site in honour of mission team member, Sally Ride, the first American woman in space, who died earlier this year.

By design, the spot was far away from the Apollo landings and other historical sites.

And even the keenest stargazer would not have spotted the two-washing machine sized probes as they impacted at a speed of 3,800mph, as the collisions occurred on the dark side of moon.

But NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter which circles the moon will soon be passing over the site and will attempt to photograph the skid marks after the craft slammed into the surface.

The mission, codenamed Grail - Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory - was launched in September 2011 from Cape Canaveral and has been deemed a success.

The twin craft collected data about the moon's gravity while orbiting at an average altitude of 34 miles, revealing its surface is much thinner than previously thought, gouged out by the impact of thousands of asteroids and comets.

'It is going to be difficult to say goodbye to our little robotic twins,' says MIT professor Maria Zuber, Grail principal investigator.

'Planetary science has advanced in a major way because of their contributions.'

Ebb and Flow conducted one final experiment before their mission ends, firing their main engines until their propellant tanks are empty in a bid to determine precisely the amount of fuel left in their tanks.

NASA engineers hope this information will help improve predictions of fuel needs for future missions.

'Our lunar twins may be in the twilight of their operational lives, but one thing is for sure, they are going down swinging,' said Grail project manager David Lehman of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.

'Even during the last half of their last orbit, we are going to do an engineering experiment that could help future missions operate more efficiently.' The twin craft focused exclusively on measuring the moon's lumpy gravity field in a bid to learn more about its interior and early history.

'After flying in formation for months, they produced the most detailed gravity maps of any body in the solar system.

Since the dawn of the Space Age, more than 100 missions have involved the moon, including Nasa's six Apollo landings that put 12 astronauts on the surface.

The last time the US space agency intentionally fired a man-made object at the moon was in 2009, but it was for the sake of science. Spectators on Earth barely saw the faintest of flashes, but the experiment proved that the moon contained water.

'Grail has produced the highest-resolution, highest-quality gravity field for any planet in the solar system, including Earth,' Zuber reportedly said.

The resulting map has revealed an incredibly pulverized lunar crust, Zuber added, suggesting that the moon, Earth, Mars, Mercury and Venus were pounded by long-ago impacts far more violently than previously thought.

Mission managers on Friday turned off Ebb and Flow's science instruments and ordered a maneuver putting them on course for the rim of the crater, which reportedly sits at a latitude of 75.62 degrees north and a longitude of 26.63 degrees east.