The Moon’s farside hosts the spectacular 312-kilometers wide Schrödinger crater with its crown-shaped mountain ring formed 3.8 to 3.9 billion years ago. The 312 kilometers wide Schrödinger crater, as ...

The real Lord of the Rings is Saturn, a massive outer planet boasting a set of rings about 27 Earths wide. Being a gas giant like Jupiter, Saturn shares many of its attributes: a strong magnetic field ...

And more such interesting Moon exploration updates from China’s National Space Day on April 24. It was in late 2023 that China opened up sample research applications to foreign scientists. The process ...

India has formally approved the joint ISRO-JAXA Chandrayaan 5 (LUPEX) mission to study water ice on the Moon’s south pole. The mission and its approval are notable in many ways as we’ll see below.

The farside also lacked the Moon’s familiar dark splotches. Formed as a result of active volcanism over 3 billion years ago, it was anyone’s guess why dark lava plains cover about 31% of the nearside ...

Where did our Moon come from? The origin of our cosmic neighbor is a fundamental question in planetary science. From Galileo’s first telescopic observations of the Moon to humans walking on its ...

For most of the 20th century, scientists thought the Moon’s surface was bone-dry. The 382 kilograms of rock and soil samples brought by the Apollo missions to Earth attested to this. When they did ...

December 2021 update: Several research results have come out of the Chandrayaan 2 orbiter’s data since I wrote this article almost 2 years ago. India’s space organization, ISRO, launched Chandrayaan 2 ...

Illustration showing the distribution of permanently shadowed regions (in blue) on the Moon’s south pole, superimposed on a digital elevation map. Image: NASA / GSFC / Timothy McClanahan / LOLA The ...

Unlike traditional missions, these CLPS missions are fully built, operated and managed by their companies, with minimal oversight from NASA. The agency only dictates preferences for the landing sites, ...

The fact that the Moon’s gravitational field is lumpy was first noticed by the Soviets when they found that their Luna 10 spacecraft was significantly deviating from its orbit. Shortly after, NASA ...

The Moon is host to a type of bright feature quite glaringly called swirls. Here is the lunar swirl of Reiner Gamma. Beautiful and bright lunar swirl of Reiner Gamma. It spans well over a hundred ...