Today anyone with a point-and-shoot camera or even a newer cell phone can snap a decent picture of the Moon but of course there was a time when that certainly wasn’t the case. Go back to the late 1830s, when photography was in its infancy and methods for capturing light and shadows on physical media were…
Category: The Moon
NASA’s Flying Observatory Found Water on the Moon During Its First Look
NASA and DLR’s Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy—a telescope-on-an-airplane called SOFIA for short—has detected yet more evidence of water on the Moon, this time in the form of H2O molecules possibly trapped within pieces of glass that form when meteorites strike the Moon’s surface. These particular findings, announced on October 26, 2020, focus on an…
Ice Hunt on the Moon Reveals Hidden Heavy Metal
Our beautiful Moon, serenely circling our world as it illuminates our evenings and tugs at our tides, is thought to have been born from a violent and catastrophic collision between a freshly-formed Earth and a Mars-sized wayward protoplanet almost four and a half billion years ago. This “giant impact hypothesis” is generally accepted because it…
Fun Fact: All the Planets in the Solar System Could Fit Between Earth and the Moon
It might seem a bit far-fetched but yes, it’s true: if you could line up all of the other planets in our Solar System in a row edge-to-edge (or more geometrically accurately, limb-to-limb) and for good measure even include Pluto, the entire queue would easily fit within the space between Earth and the Moon. (Not…
This is the Shadow of a Solar Eclipse Seen from Behind the Moon
During a total eclipse event on July 2, 2019 the shadow of the Moon passed across the southern Pacific Ocean and parts of Chile and Argentina. For viewers on Earth the event briefly turned the daytime sky to night as the Moon completely blocked the Sun, but for one spacecraft orbiting far beyond the Moon…
NASA Selects Astrobotic Rover to Prospect for Water on the Moon’s South Pole
(News from NASA) NASA has awarded Astrobotic of Pittsburgh $199.5 million to deliver NASA’s Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER) to the Moon’s South Pole in late 2023. VIPER will collect data – including the location and concentration of ice – that will be used to inform the first global water resource maps of the…
Take a Gander at Gassendi Crater
Here’s a view of lunar crater Gassendi I assembled from seven 70mm Hasselblad color film photographs captured by Apollo 16 in April 1972. The 3.6 billion-year-old Gassendi crater is 110 km (68 miles) wide and located on the edge of Mare Humorum. This view here is looking south.
This is the First Picture Taken on the Moon
At 18:45:30 UTC on February 3, 1966 the Soviet Luna 9 spacecraft made the first successful robotic soft landing on the Moon. Seven hours later it began to transmit images from the lunar surface down to Earth. The image above comprise the first two frames of the first of three panoramas captured by Luna 9’s cycloramic…
Earth and Moon as Seen from Mars
This is an image of Earth and the Moon captured from Mars by the Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC) aboard NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor on May 8, 2003. It was the first time an image had been captured from another planet—i.e., by a spacecraft in orbit—showing both bodies as discernible planetary disks, in phases. At that time Mars…
NASA CubeSat Will Shine a Laser Light on the Moon’s Darkest Craters
(Via NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory | JPL) To support the next wave of human exploration, the Lunar Flashlight mission will look for potential ice hidden at the Moon’s South Pole. As astronauts explore the Moon during the Artemis program, they may need to make use of the resources that already exist on the lunar surface….
How Government Geologists Recreated the Moon in Flagstaff, Arizona
From July 1969 to December 1972 the astronauts of NASA’s Apollo missions explored the alien landscape of the lunar surface, flag-planting, kangaroo-hopping, shuffling, digging, and Grand Prix-roving across six sites on the Moon. In order to prepare for their off-world adventures though, they needed extensive practice here on Earth so they would be ready to execute the…
Yes, NASA *Really* Went to the Moon in 1969
The Moon landings weren’t a hoax. Here’s proof.
Lights in the Dark 