Articles

Emily Lakdawalla

As a reminder that we've been crashing stuff into the Moon for decades, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) team released today a photo of the crater made by the spent upper stage of the Saturn rocket that lofted the Apollo 14 mission to the Moon.

Emily Lakdawalla

For a couple of weeks now, I've been hearing rumors about an upcoming announcement concerning Chandrayaan-1 Moon Mineralogy Mapper (

Emily Lakdawalla

How much water is there on the Moon, and is it in a form that human explorers could use? This part of the story has many more questions and many fewer definite conclusions.

Emily Lakdawalla

The images from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera or LROC are absolutely stunning.

Samuel Lawrence

For over four decades, the lunar science community has absorbed the information from the Apollo missions. Although many important questions were answered, many important new questions are waiting to be tackled -- which is the very essence of science and exploration.

Samuel Lawrence

One primary goal of the LRO mission is to acquire the amazing bounty of scientific data necessary to enable future human lunar exploration and utilization. But why should we even bother going back?

Samuel Lawrence

It is a day where when all humans should take time to celebrate the momentous achievement that put two brave explorers on the face of another world. As Sir Arthur Clarke once famously said, the Apollo voyages will likely be the only events for which the 20th century will be remembered in the future, when humans live throughout the Solar System and beyond.

Susan Lendroth

Grab your bell bottoms and Tang, and travel back to 1969 when Apollo 11's journey to the Moon captivated the world, and Neil Armstrong's and Buzz Aldrin's boot prints in the lunar dust transformed us into a multi-world species.

Timothy Reed

The editors of the site, Nature, have begun their ApolloPlus40 blog.

Susan Lendroth

This summer, the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. will commemorate that extraordinary moment in history with a very special Apollo 11 celebration, featuring the mission's original crew members along with former Johnson Space Center Director Chris Kraft.

Alan Stern

Today, I'm kicking the week off with a look at the unusually intense confluence of far flung planetary exploration that's just around the corner, starting the middle of next year.

Jim Bell

Jim Bell describes his proposal to join the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Cameras science team.

Ted Stryk

I spent a large portion of the day at the Lunar and Planetary Institute's library and presented my own poster during the poster sessions, so my coverage of Thursday's sessions is limited.

Emily Lakdawalla

It's a legal holiday here in the U.S. (President's day), and my daughter's babysitter is taking the day off, so I won't be getting much work done today. But I thought I'd check in to share the fact that, as we got out of the car last week, my daughter pointed up in the sky at the crescent moon and said

Emily Lakdawalla

As MESSENGER began its approach for its August 2 flyby of Earth, its cameras have snapped their first images. The images clearly show a cloudy Earth—and, to scientists' surprise, the Moon as well.

Emily Lakdawalla

New observations reported this week in the journal Nature have cast doubt on the theory that thick deposits of ground ice lie conveniently close to the surface in permanently shadowed crater floors at the lunar poles.

Andrew Chaikin

Apollo gave us our money's worth. The Apollo lunar samples, totaling 381 kilograms (838 pounds), along with thousands of photographs and other data, are still yielding clues to the world that has been our Rosetta stone for deciphering planetary evolution.

Carl Sagan

Carl Sagan writes that once upon a time, we soared into the solar system. For a few years. Then we hurried back. Why? What happened? What was Apollo really about?