Finding an exact copy of the Earth somewhere in the universe sounds like a far-fetched notion, but scientists believe that because Earth happened in our solar system, something similar is bound to exist someplace else. University ...
Astronomy
Sep 09, 2021
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Using the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (ESO's VLT), a team of astronomers have obtained the sharpest and most detailed images yet of the asteroid Kleopatra. The observations have allowed the team to ...
Astronomy
Sep 09, 2021
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Finding and collecting the best lunar samples will be a major task for the next astronauts on the moon. ESA's Pangaea training campaign launches today to equip astronauts with a geologist's eye on the moon—humanity's next ...
Space Exploration
Sep 06, 2021
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24
What a parting gift the Cassini mission gave us.
Space Exploration
Aug 25, 2021
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Tiny iron nanoparticles unlike any found naturally on Earth are nearly everywhere on the moon—and scientists are trying to understand why. A new study led by Northern Arizona University doctoral candidate Christian J. Tai ...
Space Exploration
Aug 20, 2021
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Japan's space agency plans to bring soil samples back from the Mars region ahead of the U.S. and Chinese missions now operating on Mars, in hopes of finding clues to the planet's origin and traces of possible life.
Space Exploration
Aug 19, 2021
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Blue Origin, the space company owned by Jeff Bezos, is suing the US government over its decision to award a massive Moon exploration contract to its competitor SpaceX, it said in a statement Monday.
Space Exploration
Aug 17, 2021
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87
A pair of researchers at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) has published a perspective piece in the journal Science outlining the efforts being conducted this decade to find out if Mars once hosted life. In their ...
The spacecraft used its infrared instrument during recent flybys of Jupiter's mammoth moon to create this latest map, which comes out a decade after Juno's launch.
Space Exploration
Aug 06, 2021
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512
In 2024, a new age of space exploration will begin when NASA sends astronauts to the moon as part of their Artemis mission, a follow-up to the Apollo missions of the 1960s and 1970s.
Space Exploration
Aug 05, 2021
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The Moon is Earth's only natural satellite and the fifth largest satellite in the Solar System. The average centre-to-centre distance from the Earth to the Moon is 384,403 km, about thirty times the diameter of the Earth. The common centre of mass of the system (the barycentre) is located about 1,700 km—a quarter the Earth's radius—beneath the surface of the Earth. The Moon makes a complete orbit around the Earth every 27.3 days (the orbital period), and the periodic variations in the geometry of the Earth–Moon–Sun system are responsible for the phases of the moon, which repeat every 29.5 days (the synodic period).
The Moon's diameter is 3,474 km, a little more than a quarter of that of the Earth. Thus, the Moon's surface area is less than a tenth that of the Earth (about a quarter the Earth's land area, approximately as large as Russia, Canada, and the United States combined), and its volume is about 2 percent that of Earth. The pull of gravity at its surface is about 17 percent of that at the Earth's surface.
The Moon is the only celestial body to which humans have traveled and upon which humans have performed a manned landing. While the Soviet Union's Luna program was the first to reach the Moon with unmanned spacecraft, the NASA Apollo program by the United States achieved the only manned missions to date, beginning with the first manned lunar mission by Apollo 8 in 1968, and six manned lunar landings between 1969 and 1972- the first being Apollo 11 in 1969. Human exploration of the Moon temporarily ceased with the conclusion of the Apollo program, although a few robotic landers and orbiters have been sent to the Moon since that time. The U.S. has committed to return to the moon by 2018.
This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA
