For some fourteen years now NASA's Desert Research and Technology Studies (Desert RATS) team has been testing out the viability of many of NASA’s vehicles, space suits, habitats and robotic systems in extreme environments.   Like their durable name-sake, the Desert RATS have proven to be resilient and flexible, adapting to the changing NASA environment. [...]

A new image to add to the family photo album! The MESSENGER spacecraft is working its way to enter orbit around Mercury in March of 2011, and while wending its way, took this image of the Earth and Moon, visible in the lower left. When the image was taken in May 2010, MESSENGER was 183 [...]

There's probably a great story in this image, if only someone was there to witness it as it happened! This is an image from Moon Zoo, the citizen science project from the Zooniverse that asks people to look at images from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and search for craters, boulders and more. And often, the [...]

With all the recent news of water on the Moon, a new paper published today in the journal Science may offer a surprise – or it may bring us back to previous assumptions about the Moon. A new analysis of eleven lunar samples from the Apollo missions by Zachary Sharp from the University of New [...]

Radar has been used since the 1960s to map the lunar surface, but until recently it has been difficult to get a good look at the Moon's poles. In 2009, the Mini-SAR radar instrument on the Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft was able to map more than 95% of both poles at 150 meter radar resolution, and now [...]

"Water cycle on the Moon" is a phrase that many people – including lunar scientists – were never expecting to hear. This surprising new finding of ubiquitous water on the surface of the Moon, revealed and confirmed by three different spacecraft last year, has been one of the main topics of recent discussion and study [...]

Lots of sites have posted this recently, but it is so good it's worth showing up one more time on the interwebs. This is a clip from a British comedy show "That Mitchell and Webb Look," that debunks the notion that the Moon landings were faked, in a way that only British TV can!

If there's only one thing we've learned from all the highly successful recent Moon missions – the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, LCROSS, Chandrayaan-1 and Kaguya — it's that the Moon is perplexingly different from our perceptions of the past 40 years. The discovery of water and volatiles across the surface and in the permanently shadowed regions [...]

I'm attending the NASA Lunar Science Institute's Lunar Forum at Ames Research Center in California, which will feature sessions on recent scientific results as well as talks on future opportunities for lunar science, education and outreach. Notably, there will be new results from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, LCROSS and more. If you'd like to know [...]

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Long-held secrets continue to be unlocked from the Moon. Researchers taking a new look at a rock brought back by the Apollo 17 mission have discovered graphite in the form of tiny whiskers within the lunar sample. Just like the recent finding of water on the Moon, it was previously thought that any carbon present [...]