| Blue moon (13) |  |
| Enceladus (20) | |
| Full moon (6) | |
| Moon (167) | |
| Moons of mars (8) | |
| New moon (6) | |
a lunar mission named after a Moon goddess with a six-wheeled rover named Yutu,
China has made no secret of its designs on the Moon, with speculation that one of its citizens will walk on the surface within the next ten years.
since the US and Soviet union to put exploratory spacecraft on the Moon#the last time being the Soviet Luna 24 mission in 1976.
Senior Curator in the Division of Space History at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum,"help to answer some important questions about the origins of the Moon and geologic processes there.#
but of course, Moon missions have never solely been about science. In September 1961, President John F Kennedy set the US the challenge of landing on the Moon before the end of the decade.
Fuelled by Cold war fears and supposedly by the Bay of Pigs fiasco, Kennedy wanted to take on
As with Apollo, China's missions to the Moon could also reap huge technological benefits.
"When the Chinese are standing on the Moon, there will be many members of the US Congress that will proclaim their"shock#at that happening,
Regardless of when or how China chooses to send a manned mission to the Moon,
and bounced on the Moon, before placing a flag on its surface. But the flag didn't have the familiar stars-and-stripes pattern.
His rather lofty goal was to put a Zambian on the moon before anybody else.
which supported several early robotic missions to the moon during the Apollo programme. In the following decades, South africa developed its own space research projects, mostly for military purposes.
One shot onlycurrently due for launch in 2018, the JWST will be stationed 1 million miles (1. 5 million km) from Earth#some five times further away from us than the Moon.
Are we to believe that a country which sent a man to the moon and created the internet can figure out how to integrate alternative power sources into the power grid?
so wee prepared to fly our results to the moon and back to give taxpayers a return on investment.
which they were extractedsays Robert J. Moon a researcher from the US Forest Service s Forest Products Laboratory
#Craters within crater hint at moonâ#diversity Brown University right Original Studyposted by Kevin Stacey-Brown on December 9 2013 Small craters on the moon that are within one of the largest
craters in the solar system may offer clues as to how the moon formed. A massive impact on the moon about 4 billion years ago left the 2500-mile crater.
Comparing the spectra of light reflected from the peaks of those later craters may yield clues to the composition of the Moon'#lower crust
Data from the Moon Mineralogy Mapper that flew aboard India'#Chandrayaan-1 lunar orbiter shows a diverse mineralogy in the subsurface of the giant South pole Aitken basin.
If that'#true then the South pole Aitken (SPA) basin could hold important information about the Moon'#interior and the evolution of its crust and mantle.
At 2500 kilometers across the SPA is the largest impact basin on the Moon and perhaps the largest in the solar system.
Using Moon Mineralogy Mapper data the researchers looked at the light reflected from each of the four central peaks.
and found significant compositional differences between these central peaks The Moon Mineralogy Mapper has very high spatial and spectral resolution.
We haven'##t really been able to look at the moon in this kind of detail before. he next step is figuring out where that diversity comes from.
If indeed the diversity reflects preexisting material the SPA could hold important clues about the composition of the Moon'#lower crust
and it doesn'##t contain olivine that would have substantial implications for models of how the Moon was formed Moriarty says.
but it also pushes in the opposite direction in the liquid outer core which creates a westward motion. he solid iron inner core is about the size of the Moon.
"says graduate student Chris Moon, one of the authors of the work published in Nature Nanotechnology1.
But Moon and his colleagues saw a way to go smaller by using a quantum analogy to the conventional hologram.
#Moon-size exoplanet circling sun-like star smallest yet A newfound world called Kepler 37 b could easily blend in to the long and growing list of known extrasolar planets,
In fact, it is just a shade larger than Earth s moon.""What makes this very interesting is this is a planet smaller than anything we see in our own inner solar system,
#China set to launch probe on round trip to the moon China is planning to launch an uncrewed spacecraft on a quick jaunt around the moon in a test of technology designed to return rocks from the lunar surface to Earth.
It will fly around the back of the moon and return to Earth using a parachute to slow its decent through the atmosphere about 8 days later.
This future mission will send a lunar orbiter that will release a lander to touch down on the moon's surface and collect 2 kilograms of soil and rock.
China's most recent moon mission Chang'e 3 placed a lander and rover on the moon last year.
China has partnered also with a Luxembourg-based firm called Luxspace to send a tiny spacecraft called the Manfred Memorial Moon Mission around the moon.
Comets asteroids and icy moons have shown all signs of venting plumes into space. But because these bodies are far from Earth
The researchers tested the software on unprocessed images of comet Hartley 2 and Saturn's moon Enceladus.
The program looks for bright material outside the limb of the moon or comet checks that the material meets up with the surface
#Squirting moons face off in race to find alien life Icebound seas just keep getting hotter at least as candidates for life beyond Earth.
Fresh discoveries have put two moons in our solar system neck and neck in the race.
In December astronomers announced hints of watery plumes spurting from Jupiter's large moon Europa potentially giving us a peek into a vast ocean likely to exist beneath its ice.
Saturn's moon Enceladus stole back the limelight last week when NASA reported firm evidence of an ocean linked to geysers at its south pole (see diagram below.
Cassini scientist Luciano Iess at the Sapienza University of Rome Italy and colleagues have mapped now Enceladus's gravity
The constantly gushing geysers would let us easily sample those seas making Enceladus a prime target for a life-seeking mission says Cassini scientist Carolyn Porco.
and scoop up some of the plume for analysis avoiding a tricky landing on the moon's surface.
The habitable zone of Enceladus remains the most well studied well understood and accessible of all the destinations for finding life
Models suggest that the moon can host geothermal vents which would be hotspots for marine life
And Jupiter's strong magnetic field means that intense radiation surrounds the moon which makes it difficult for spacecraft to operate.
Could Cassini yet yield insights that would swing things in favour of Enceladus? The craft is in its twilight years
But first it will fly by Enceladus one more time and the team will be watching for any molecular hydrogen in the plumes.
Europa is sized a good moon but Enceladus is tiny. That thing should be frozen solid and dead as a doorbell says NASA program scientist Curt Niebur who heads the committee that will evaluate science instruments for a Europa mission.
Instead it's incredibly lively. That's amazing. They're both unbelievably good candidates which is the shocking thing:
#Buried'Lake superior'seen on Saturn's moon Enceladus Saturn's icy moon Enceladus already known for spitting plumes of water into space just got even more interesting.
-and that this liquid water is in direct contact with the moon's core which is rich in nutrients.
The result comes hot on the heels of the discovery late last year that a second icy moon Europa
Both moons are now among the hottest prospects in the solar system for finding alien life
if only a suitable mission could be arranged NASA's Cassini orbiter first spotted spectacular plumes at Enceladus's south pole in 2005 shortly after arriving at Saturn.
They make an attractive target for exploration as a craft could potentially fly through them to take samples much simpler than landing on a moon.
Luciano Iess at the Sapienza University of Rome in Italy and his colleagues used radar On earth to track Cassini on three separate fly-bys of Enceladus
and watched how the spacecraft was accelerated by the moon's gravity. This allowed them to map the distribution of mass in the moon's interior.
They found that Enceladus has a rocky core and an icy crust. Before we knew almost nothing about the core beyond its likely existence.
Now we know roughly how big it is and also that it has a surprisingly low density says team member Francis Nimmo at the University of California Santa cruz. That might be due to open fractures
Hosting an ocean in contact with rocks boosts the chances that Enceladus hosts life because the rocks could leach elements like potassium sulphur and phosphorus vital for life into the water.
because it wouldn't be in contact with the rock says team member Jonathan Lunine at Cornell University in Ithaca New york. This gravity map hinting at a much larger ocean is a more favourable model for having some sort of life in Enceladus's interior.
However Cassini team member Carolyn Porco at the Space science Institute in Boulder Colorado has written a paper (soon to appear in the journal Astrobiology) arguing for a mission to collect samples from Enceladus and return them to Earth.
As for the possibility of the sea freezing completely it is true that Enceladus is losing a lot of heat to space
We are looking at Enceladus at a wonderful special time where it's very active
Even if they continue at the current rate the moon would only have lost 30 per cent of its water by mass
what was once an ice moon. Journal reference: Science DOI: 10.1126/science. 125055 5
#Mini robot space surgeon to climb inside astronauts It could one day answer the prayers of astronauts who need surgery in deep space.
#China lands on moon kicks off next lunar space race Let the modern moon rush begin.
China's first moon landing which took place on Saturday afternoon (GMT) marks the rekindling of humanity's love affair with our only natural satellite.
This flotilla of 21st-century moon explorers should arrive bristling with technologies that will help them map the moon's uncharted regions
The crew of the final Apollo mission lifted off from the moon's Sea of Serenity on 14 december 1972.
For the next few decades the moon's only visitors were a dozen or so orbiters and deliberate crashes such as NASA's LCROSS mission in 2009
and South korea are also in the running to send missions to the moon that would involve combinations of landers and rovers.
The moon is the nearest island in space out from the Earth says Igor Mitrofanov at Russia's Institute for Space Research in Moscow the project scientist for two planned Russian-led rover missions.
As countries develop their space programmes the moon is a natural first foray beyond Earth that allows remote-controlled robots to get their sea legs
But the moon is more than a test bed for space missions. China's Yutu rover will venture a few kilometres away from its landing site to snap images take stock of minerals with onboard spectrometers and probe below the surface with radar.
and evolution of the moon is to know those of Earth says Tatsuaki Hashimoto of the Japan aerospace exploration agency the lead scientist for a proposed lunar rover called SELENE-2. The moon is thought to have coalesced from the debris of an impact between a Mars-sized world and Earth
Several of the proposed exploration missions are targeting the moon's poles which have never been visited by a lander.
The damp moon could also be a useful resource for future robotic and human exploration says Paul Spudis of the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston Texas. Astronauts could drink moon water extracted from its rocks or use it as radiation shielding.
Water could also be split into hydrogen and oxygen for use as rocket fuel. Much of the weight of today's rockets comes from their own propellant so having a source of fuel already in space would pave the way for much more ambitious human missions.
The Google Lunar X Prize is offering $20 million to the first private team that by the end of 2015 launches a lunar spacecraft that can land on the moon travel 500 metres
and teams of human miners to the moon to supply water for fuel depots that it would place in Earth orbit t
They hope their propelled Cubesats will one day fly to Saturn's moon Enceladus and Jupiter's moon Europa, both
A fleet of Cubesats with propulsion in orbit around a planet or moon can do a lot of things that big expensive satellites cannot, such as monitoring several locations in the atmosphere at once.
and now has plans for further probes to study the moon and space weather. These projects may seem divorced from India's development goals
because its electronics could not withstand the heat radiated from the moon. MOM should also help to unravel some of the planet's mysteries.
#NASA orbiter will use laser to bring broadband to moon The man in the moon is about to get his own version of a broadband connection as well as a visit from China.
NASA's LADEE moon orbiter due to launch on 7 september will use laser pulses to exchange high-capacity signals with Earth.
LLCD will beam signals to Earth at 622 megabits per second six times as fast as is currently possible from the moon.
LADEE is not the only visitor the moon will receive in the coming months. China's upcoming spacecraft Chang'e-3 will be the first the country has landed on a celestial body.
and possibly land people on the moon in the 2020s says Dean Cheng of the Heritage Foundation a think tank in WASHINGTON DC.
Sprint-A will also peer at Jupiter's moon Io the most volcanically active body in the solar system to see how the tiny moon influences Jupiter's mighty auroras.
But progress so far suggests that more advanced plans such as a moon base or a crewed Martian trek may not be beyond China's reach.
Plans to return to the moon under George w bush's administration for instance morphed into crewed missions to an asteroid under Barack Obama's presidency.
Astronauts drilled into rocks on the moon and Soviet landers drilled on the moon and on Venus. Curiosity's predecessors the rovers Spirit and Opportunity each had a tool that scraped away the top layers of rocks to see what was beneath
but they were equipped not to extract anything for analysis. That means Curiosity is the first Mars rover to make a deep hole and collect
and Dust environment Explorer (LADEE) spacecraft had made history by using a pulsed laser beam to transmit data over the 239000 miles from the moon to Earth at a record-breaking data-download speed of 622 megabits per second (Mbps). This download speed is more than six times faster than the speed achieved by the best
radio system ever flown to the moon. LLCD also demonstrated a data-upload speed of 20 Mbps on a laser beam transmitted from a ground station in New mexico to the LADEE spacecraft in lunar orbit;
this speed is 5000 times faster than the upload speed of the best radio system sent to the moon.
Mars landers and orbiters gather much more information in the form of images for example than they can send back over the huge distance Mars is as much as 1000 times farther from Earth than the moon despite the incredible development of NASA s radio-based
Setting up shop on Phobos and Deimos Mars Titan Europa...Later on sky cities wafting through the Venusian atmosphere (oxygen is a lifting gas on that planet so technically a simple Nitrogen/Oxygen atmosphere
I want craft that can support bases on the Moon flag planting ceremonies on Mars Europa and Titan.
Its 2013 and we still havent even dug up that Monolith on the Moon.@@Oniraptor...NASA and Spacex are doing
#Russia Will Launch Its First Moon Mission Since The 1970s Roscosmos the Russian federal space agency will launch an unmanned mission to the moon in 2015 according to agency head Vladimir Popovkin.
The rocket carrying the robotic probe called Luna-Glob will be the first set off from Russia's new Far east launchpad the Vostochny cosmodrome.
Luna-Glob the first of four planned Russian moon missions will carry scientific equipment to take soil samples
It will be the first Russian trip to the moon since the 1970s. Roscosmos'latest moon exploration project has been postponed several times
since 2010 and will be its first mission after 2011's Phobos-Grunt failure. The probe set to collect samples from the Martian moon Phobos unsuccessfully aimed its course for Mars
and crashed into the Pacific ocean after two months in Earth's orbit. Luna-Glob and its successors are part of a larger plan to revamp development of Russia's space industry.
Plans are also in development to send a manned spacecraft to the moon in 2018. Washington post I like the moon.
I hope we humans and robots settle there. Besides it will give the humans a place to stay after the robots take over the Earth.
When I read the title I thought they were doing a manned mission. It would be good to see people leave the confines of low orbit for the first time in 50 years.
and launch facilities on the moon. This is what robots should be doing there about now.
The Chinese have aspirations for putting a man on the moon and maybe Putin feels the Russians could make a profit selling a lunar space system to the Chinese.
Well think if we improve our ability to send larger and larger payloads to the moon then we could use it for useful things.
On the moon you have 14 of our days of sunlight and then 14 of our days of dark.
On the moon the sunlight is moderated not by an atmosphere. Agreed d
#This Woman Sees 100 Times More Colors Than The Average Person When Concetta Antico looks at a leaf she sees much more than just green.
#Chinaâ#moon landing and rover tip of iceberg Yutu (Jade Rabbit#)China rover-like robot was landed soft on the moon earlier this month.
and crevasses on the moon or Mars. He says the next generation of devices will have specific applications,
Many, many moons ago I used to be a DJ myself and one of the terms that DJS use when you go record-shopping is rate-digging,
#Fly to the moon in FOUR hours: The british scientist who says he's found the secret of Star trek's'warp speed'Anyone who has watched ever an episode of Star trek
U s. space agency Nasa is thought to have tested successfully a revolutionary new power source that could enable spacecraft to travel to the Moon in just four hours instead of more than three days and to Mars in two or three weeks instead of seven months.
when the news comes from Nasa an organisation that put men on the Moon and sent rockets to Mars. According to Nasa engineer Paul March,
His prototype looks like something sci-fi writer Jules Verne might have dreamt up to blast Victorians to the Moon.
with the Perseids offering one of the greatest displays of the past seven years as the meteor shower coincides with a new moon for the first time since 2007.
71, saying the'moon will be the biggest factor'.'He said:''If it is a full moon then you can't see much
but this year we've got a clear sky. We could be lucky and being able to see the ISS is added an bonus.'Robin Scagell,
'The moon is out of the way which makes a lot of difference because the sky will be much darker all night.
Exceptionally dark skies will provide the best possible conditions for viewing the shooting stars this week due to an invisible new moon.
since 2007 that the shower has coincided with a new moon, offering the best visibility of the light show.
#The moon has a NEON atmosphere: Ladee spacecraft confirms presence of the gas for the first time The presence of neon in the moon atmosphere has been a subject of speculation for decades.
Now, for the first time, scientists have confirmed the gas is not only present, but abundant on the moon. The discovery was made by analysing data sent back from Nasa Lunar Atmosphere and Dust environment Explorer,
known as Ladee. he presence of neon in the exosphere of the moon has been a subject of speculation since the Apollo missions,
but no credible detections were made, said Mehdi Benna of Nasa's Goddard Space flight Centre in Greenbelt,
show there is not enough neon to make the moon glow, but its thin atmophere is made up of mostly, helium, argon and neon.
there is not enough neon to make the moon glow visibly, because the moon's atmosphere is about 100 trillion times less dense that the Earth at sea level.
The moon atmosphere is referred technically to as an exosphere because it so thin. Exospheres are the most common type of atmosphere in our solar system,
so scientists are keen to learn more about them. t's critical to learn about the lunar exosphere before sustained human exploration substantially alters it,
Since the moon's atmosphere is so thin, rocket exhaust from spacecraft could easily change its composition.
Most of the moon's exosphere comes from the solar wind, which is a thin stream of electrically conducting gas blown from the surface of the sun into space at around a million miles per hour.
All these elements impact the moon, but only helium, neon, and argon are volatile enough to be returned back to space.
The rest of the elements will stick indefinitely to the moon surface. Ladee NMS instrument confirmed the moon exosphere is made up of mostly helium, argon, and neon.
The make-up of the mixture changes depending on the time of day, with argon peaking at sunrise, neon at 4am and helium at 1am.
found in the rocks of all the terrestrial planets as a leftover from their formation. e were surprised also to find that argon-40 creates a local bulge above an unusual part of the moon's surface,
The scientists found that argon-40 creates a local bulge above an unusual part of the moon's surface
the region containing Mare Imbrium (shown)+ 6 The scientists found that argon-40 creates a local bulge above an unusual part of the moon's surface,
trapped, frozen or absorbed in some material-from the surface that is triggered by tidal stress on the moon.
Ladee readings also revealed an unexpected source of some of the helium in the lunar exosphere. bout 20 percent of the helium is coming from the moon itself, most likely as the result from the decay of radioactive thorium and uranium
The spacecraft entered its science orbit around the moon's equator in Mid-november and its mission was extended.
and sensing for robots used to explore the moon and planets. It also could be incorporated readily into most smartphones.
In polar regions of the moon, where the sun is always at a low angle, a vision system that is able to eliminate the glare is essential. ow-power sensing is very important,
a crescent moon is about 0. 3 lux. Infrared illumination has made it possible to capture such dim environments previously,
but only 20 were built ever after an Anglo-french development program in the 1960s that was compared to the Apollo Moon landings in cost and complexity.
the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope's 3. 2-gigapixel camera will capture an area of the sky 40 times the size of the full moon
and Neumann says even getting off the Moon or larger asteroids will remain a job for rockets.
However, he says his drive could be suitable for lifting a spacecraft from low gravity objects like Mars'moons Phobos
and Deimos. sing very rough, very early calculations we think 20 kilograms 44 pounds of magnesium could get a 100 kilogram 220 pound ship to Mars and back.
or on a refuelling station established at Phobos or Deimos, preparatory to the voyage. Neumann says experiments with pulsed electric arcs on metals go back to the 1920s,
This year, there will be a new moon, providing maximum darkness for stargazers. If you must look at a star map,
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