While the moon's surface is battered by millions of craters, it also has over 200 holes - steep-walled pits that in some cases might lead to caves that future astronauts could explore and use for shelter, according to new observations from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) spacecraft.
Apollo mission planners selected an adventurous landing site for Apollo 15 located on a relatively small patch of lava plains, called "mare" on the moon.
Work presented today at the Goldschmidt Geochemistry Conference in Sacramento, California, shows that the timing of the giant impact between Earth's ancestor and a planet-sized body occurred around 40 million years after the start of solar system formation.
A group of scientists believe that a previously unexplained isotopic ratio from deep within the Earth may be a signal from material from the time before the Earth collided with another planet-sized body, leading to the creation of the Moon.
A recent review of hundreds of chemical analyses of Moon rocks indicates that the amount of water in the Moon's interior varies regionally - revealing clues about how water originated and was redistributed in the Moon.
The dark and shadowed regions of the Moon fascinate astronomers and Pink Floyd fans alike. Our Moon's rotation axis has a tilt of 1.5o, meaning that some parts of its polar regions never see sunlight - the bottoms of certain craters, for example, are always in shadow.
New images of Earth's Moon reveal more than can be seen with the naked eye, thanks to the combined efforts of the two largest radio telescopes of their kind -- the National Radio Astronomy Observatory's Green Bank Telescope (GBT) in West Virginia and the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico.
Just before NASA's latest Moon mission ended last week, an ESA telescope received laser signals from the spacecraft, achieving data speeds like those used by many to watch movies at home via fibre-optic Internet.
Ground controllers at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., have confirmed that NASA's Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) spacecraft impacted the surface of the moon, as planned, between 9:30 and 10:22 p.m. PDT Thursday, April 17.
The United States was in a prime orbital position and time of day to view the eclipse on April 15, 2014.
ISEE-3 Reboot Project (IRP): Our plan is simple: we intend to contact the ISEE-3 (International Sun-Earth Explorer) spacecraft, command it to fire its engine and enter an orbit near Earth, and then resume its original mission - a mission it began in 1978.
When people in North America look up at the sky in the early morning hours of April 15, they can expect the moon to look a little different.
NASA's Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) spacecraft is gradually lowering its orbital altitude to continue making science observations prior to its planned impact on the moon's surface on or before April 21.
The amount of water present in the moon may have been overestimated by scientists studying the mineral apatite, says a team of researchers led by Jeremy Boyce of the UCLA Department of Earth, Planetary and Space Sciences.
A newly enhanced image of Earth taken from lunar orbit 47 years ago has been released. The image, taken by Lunar Orbiter 1 in 1966, is the latest in a series of images released by the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project (LOIRP).
Scientists, using cameras aboard NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), have created the largest high resolution mosaic of our moon's north polar region.
The moon just over the horizon seen from the NASA P-3 over northeast Greenland during an IceBridge survey flight on Mar. 12, 2014.
Before we address today's space policy issues, it must be understood that the core problem with the America's "space program" has been with us since the Apollo program "space race" began in earnest in the early 1960's. As such, we need to look through the lens of history.
NASA's Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) just achieved a very important milestone: 100 days of prime science.
Chang'e 3 landed on the moon's Mare Imbrium (Sea of Rains), on Dec. 14, 2013. The LROC instrument aboard NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has now imaged the Chinese lander and rover three times.