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 ...

Unlike the millions of years it takes for most mountains on Earth to form, lunar mountains crop out near-instantly, geologically speaking. Earth’s mountains primarily form when two colliding plates of ...

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, ...

Update in January 2024: KPLO has not only been successfully capturing beautiful high resolution images of the Moon’s surface but uniquely studying it for various scientific purposes. On August 5, 2022 ...

The next five years of exploring our Moon will not just be marked by the upcoming armada of robotic landers but also the sheer diversity of mobile explorers they’ll deploy. Here’s a look at all the ...

Moon Monday #218: A molten Moon, a date for the SPA, sunset for Blue Ghost as well as inclusive Artemis language, and more There’s a lot in this Moon Monday edition to unpack. Grab yourself a coffee ...

Plus: Contextualizing the failure of Intuitive Machines’ second Moon mission and that of Lunar Trailblazer as grave losses for NASA. In the half a lunar day since its local morning landing, Firefly ...

Since NASA intends to sustain its return to the Moon, the LTV will be far more capable than the Lunar Roving Vehicle (LRV) used by Apollo astronauts, and more sophisticated than even the current crop ...

Seen here is the young, bright Aristarchus crater on the Moon about the size of a large city. The 40 kilometers diameter Aristarchus crater, as seen by Credit: NASA Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) ...

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 ...

NASA’s VIPER lunar rover after acing thermal vacuum testing. Image: Anthony Colaprete / NASA The Planetary Society has been holding multiple meetings of lunar scientists with US congressional staff, ...

The Chandrayaan 3 spacecraft stack is seen here mounted in an acoustic chamber. The stack comprises the lander and an orbiter for co-flight until lunar orbit. Credit: ISRO The 1752-kilogram ...