SpaceX test fires a Raptor engine, simulating a lunar landing

When NASA astronauts return to the surface of the moon in the Artemis III mission, the plan is to use a modified SpaceX Starship as their lunar lander. NASA announced last week that SpaceX has now demonstrated an important ...

Has Earth's oxygen rusted the Moon for billions of years?

To the surprise of many planetary scientists, the oxidized iron mineral hematite has been discovered at high latitudes on the Moon, according to a study published today in Science Advances led by Shuai Li, assistant researcher ...

Simulations show lander exhaust could cloud studies of lunar ices

A new study led by scientists at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, shows that exhaust from a mid-sized lunar lander can quickly spread around the Moon and potentially contaminate scientifically ...

Total lunar eclipse: observing the Earth as a transiting planet

Astronomers have succeeded in recording sunlight shining through the Earth's atmosphere in a manner similar to the study of distant exoplanets. During the extraordinary occasion of a lunar eclipse, the Large Binocular Telescope ...

Lunar tunnel engineers excited by boring Moon colonies

As space agencies prepare to return humans to the Moon, top engineers are racing to design a tunnel boring machine capable of digging underground colonies for the first lunar inhabitants.

Earth's atmosphere stretches out to the moon – and beyond

The gaseous layer that wraps around Earth reaches up to 630,000 kilometers away, or 50 times the diameter of our planet, according to a new study based on observations by the ESA/NASA Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, SOHO, ...

NASA studies tethered CubeSat mission to study lunar swirls

A novel mission concept involving two CubeSats connected by a thin, miles-long tether could help scientists understand how the moon got its mysterious "tattoos"—swirling patterns of light and dark found at more than 100 ...

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