November of 2011 was a particularly exciting time for planetary scientists. Russia had launched its Phobos-Grunt spacecraft to land on Mars’ moon Phobos, the first ever such attempt. The spacecraft ...

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 ...

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, ...

This diagram shows the approximate relative sizes of our solar system’s planets, moons and dwarf planets, Credit: Emily Lakdawalla / The Planetary Society Our solar system is a wondrous place.

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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, ...

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 ...

How will ISRO go from Chandrayaan 3 to an Indian on the Moon? Clarifying and laying down India’s plans for increasingly complex robotic lunar missions, where human spaceflight comes in, and what ...