The real Lord of the Rings is Saturn, a massive outer planet boasting a set of rings about 27 Earths wide. Being a gas giant like Jupiter, Saturn shares many of its attributes: a strong magnetic field ...

Left: The Atlas V rocket of United Launch Alliance (ULA) taking off with NASA’s Curiosity rover inside the fairing. Right: Tory Bruno, CEO and President of ULA. Image credits: ULA Glued to the Apollo ...

The Moon’s farside hosts the spectacular 312-kilometers wide Schrödinger crater with its crown-shaped mountain ring formed 3.8 to 3.9 billion years ago. The 312 kilometers wide Schrödinger crater, as ...

For all our abilities, humans are puny creatures on the scale of space. The Universe we exist in is just too vast and beyond our intuitive contemplation. As we start the new year with wishes and ...

Venus is a hellscape. Its thick carbon dioxide atmosphere creates a runaway greenhouse effect causing average surface temperatures of 470 degrees Celsius—hot enough to melt lead. Venus’ inhospitable ...

NASA might need to add another Human Landing System provider, Russia shapes plans to land cosmonauts on the Moon, farside missions for big science, see the Moon in 3D, and more lunar developments. Out ...

The Chandrayaan 3 lander on the Moon with its ChaSTE thermal probe deployed. Image: ISRO Left: Temperature profiles measured by the ten ChaSTE sensors at different depths; Right: Structural diagram of ...

Multi-agency instruments planned to be on the LUPEX rover. Image: JAXA / M. Ohtake, et al. India approved the joint ISRO-JAXA Chandrayaan 5 / LUPEX mission to drill and analyze water ice on the Moon.

There’s a lot in this Moon Monday edition to unpack. Grab yourself a coffee or another mild drug of choice and let’s get started. 🤓 An artist's concept of our Moon shortly after its formation, with a ...

For most of the 20th century, scientists thought the Moon’s surface was bone-dry. The 382 kilograms of rock and soil samples brought by the Apollo missions to Earth attested to this. When they did ...

India has formally approved the joint ISRO-JAXA Chandrayaan 5 (LUPEX) mission to study water ice on the Moon’s south pole. The mission and its approval are notable in many ways as we’ll see below.

Welcome back to Moon Monday! 2024 was a happening year for global lunar exploration. We start this month with the impending launch of two Moon landers so 2025 seems thrilling already. Before diving ...