More than 50 years after the last Apollo mission, the United States will try once again to land a craft on the moon on January 25, said the head of what could be the first private company to successfully touch down on the ...
Space Exploration
Nov 30, 2023
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NASA is accelerating plans to return Americans to the Moon, and this time, the US space agency says it will be there to stay.
Space Exploration
Feb 15, 2019
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The Apollo missions to the Moon brought a total of 2,196 rock samples to Earth. But NASA has only just started opening one of the last ones, collected 50 years ago.
Planetary Sciences
Mar 11, 2022
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The 49ers who panned for gold during California's Gold Rush didn't really know where they might strike it rich. They had word of mouth and not much else to go on.
Space Exploration
Jun 1, 2020
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The Earth‐moon system's history remains mysterious. Scientists believe the system formed when a Mars‐sized body collided with the proto‐Earth. Earth ended up being the larger daughter of this collision and retained ...
Astronomy
Jun 22, 2020
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The Earth is unique in our solar system: It is the only terrestrial planet with a large amount of water and a relatively large moon, which stabilizes the Earth's axis. Both were essential for Earth to develop life. Planetologists ...
Astronomy
May 21, 2019
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Even by the wild standards of the outer solar system, the strange orbits that carry Neptune's two innermost moons are unprecedented, according to newly published research.
Astronomy
Nov 15, 2019
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Japan's space agency said Thursday that its first lunar mission hit the tiny patch of the moon's surface it was aiming for, in a successful demonstration of its pinpoint landing system—although the probe appears to be lying ...
Space Exploration
Jan 25, 2024
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408
Have you ever wondered what kind of rocks make up those bright and dark splotches on the moon? Well, the USGS has just released a new authoritative map to help explain the 4.5-billion-year-old history of our nearest neighbor ...
Space Exploration
Apr 22, 2020
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An Israeli spacecraft called Beresheet almost made it to the moon in April. It took a selfie with the lunar surface in the background, but then lost contact with Earth and presumably crashed onto the lunar surface. Now it's ...
Space Exploration
Aug 9, 2019
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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
