What does an eclipse look like from the moon? Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost lander just sent back a stunning image from the lunar surface. The commercial space company’s lander, which touched down on the moon’s surface without a hitch on March 2 as part of a mission for NASA, took a high-definition image of the … Read more
Inside a small control room, during the middle of the day on Thursday local time in Texas, about a dozen white-knuckled engineers at a space startup named Intuitive Machines started to get worried. Their spacecraft, a lander named Athena, was beginning its final descent down to the lunar surface. A little more than a year … Read more
But, of course, you need to make the fuel there in the first place. The obvious choice for that is water, which can be split to produce hydrogen and oxygen. We know there is water on the Moon, but we don’t yet know how much, and whether it’s concentrated into large deposits. Given that uncertainty, … Read more
That mission, and the 2020 Chang’e-5 robotic mission before it, are the first to return lunar rocks to Earth since the 1970s. Together they are building on what scientists learned from Apollo-era missions, helping to unravel mysteries about how the Moon was formed and why it looks the way it does today, and providing clues … Read more
Scientists are pretty sure Europa has the water, perhaps twice as much as the water in all of Earth’s oceans. Jupiter’s strong gravity field constantly tugs on Europa as it orbits its parent planet every three-and-a-half days, squeezing and flexing the moon’s insides, and generating heat through tidal forces. These forces could drive hydrothermal vents … Read more
