By Savannah Bullard One year after winning second place in NASA’s Break the Ice Lunar Challenge, members of the small business Starpath visited NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, as part of their prize opportunity to test their upgraded lunar regolith excavation and transportation rover in the center’s 20-foot thermal vacuum chamber. The … Read more
Join observers from around the world on Saturday, Oct. 4, for NASA’s International Observe the Moon Night. This annual event offers an opportunity for earthlings to celebrate the inspiring bond between Earth and the Moon, and, this year, to share in the excitement of NASA’s preparations for Artemis II. Launching in early 2026, the mission … Read more
When asteroids hit the Moon, the impacts carve out craters and with enough energy and pressure, melt parts of the rocky surface. Often, the white hot, gooey melt (it’s like lava, except that it doesn’t erupt from underground) sloshes around the new crater and surrounding regions. The molten rock cools and hardens into vast rock … Read more
With Artemis II, NASA is taking the science of living and working in space beyond low Earth orbit. While the test flight will help confirm the systems and hardware needed for human deep space exploration, the crew also will be serving as both scientists and volunteer research subjects, completing a suite of experiments that will … Read more
Lonnie Shekhtman Aug 21, 2025 NASA’s Artemis II mission, set to send four astronauts on a nearly 10-day mission around the Moon and back, will advance the agency’s goal to land astronauts at the Moon’s south polar region and will help set the stage for future crewed Mars missions. While the Artemis II crew will … Read more
The Moon’s light is refracted by Earth’s atmosphere in this April 13, 2025, photograph from the International Space Station as it orbited into a sunset 264 miles above the border between Bolivia and Brazil in South America. Understanding the Moon helps us understand other planets, how they have evolved and the processes which have shaped … Read more
As NASA prepares to send astronauts to the surface of the Moon’s south polar region for the first time ever during the Artemis III mission, scientists are working on methods to determine the frequency of moonquakes along active faults there. Faults are cracks in the Moon’s crust that indicate that the Moon is slowly shrinking … Read more
The small satellite was to map lunar water, but operators lost contact with the spacecraft the day after launch and were unable to recover the mission. NASA’s Lunar Trailblazer ended its mission to the Moon on July 31. Despite extensive efforts, mission operators were unable to establish two-way communications after losing contact with the spacecraft … Read more
NASA has awarded Firefly Aerospace of Cedar Park, Texas, $176.7 million to deliver two rovers and three scientific instruments to the lunar surface as part of the agency’s CLPS (Commercial Lunar Payload Services) initiative and Artemis campaign to explore more of the Moon than ever before. This delivery is the first time NASA will use … Read more
NASA has selected three instruments to travel to the Moon, with two planned for integration onto an LTV (Lunar Terrain Vehicle) and one for a future orbital opportunity. The LTV is part of NASA’s efforts to explore the lunar surface as part of the Artemis campaign and is the first crew-driven vehicle to operate on … Read more