Articles

Emily Lakdawalla

Here's the sharpest optical image shown today of the Moon, from Palomar Observatory.

Emily Lakdawalla

I am pretty sure this image shows the LCROSS impact plume and its shadow as seen from the MMT observatory in Arizona, but as Alan Boyle just pointed out, the time stamps indicate the photos were all taken before the nominal impact time.

Emily Lakdawalla

This plot just shows the aggregate radiance in ultraviolet and visible wavelengths -- all wavelengths -- seen by one of LCROSS' spectrometers after the Centaur hit the Moon.

Emily Lakdawalla

It's been a little difficult to get a hold of the graphics that they used at this morning's press briefing.

Emily Lakdawalla

The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Diviner team just released some preliminary views of their data taken during the LCROSS impact, which clearly shows the thermal signature from the crash into the Moon.

Emily Lakdawalla

Quite a night! I set my alarm for 3:15 am in order to get up and watch LCROSS crash into the Moon.

Emily Lakdawalla

Way early tomorrow morning, LCROSS and its Centaur upper stage will crash into the lunar south pole.

Emily Lakdawalla

The visualization studio at Goddard Space Flight Center has just posted some handy simulations of what we can expect the LCROSS impact to look like.

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.

Bruce Betts

Based on analyses of previously unstudied telescopic data, NASA scientists have released new predictions for the path of the 300-meter-diameter asteroid Apophis.

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.

Emily Lakdawalla

High in the Arctic, just below Earth's north polar ice cap, biologists, geologists, and engineers come together in Svalbard every August to practice and prepare for an expedition to Mars.

Emily Lakdawalla

Now that it's high summer in the Arctic, it's time for research expeditions to swarm northward to explore icy landscapes as analogues to Mars and other far-off places.

Jani Radebaugh

Jani talks about the importance of understanding analogs we can easily visit on Earth to processes happening across the solar system.

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.