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A piece of prime real estate on the Moon is much older than previously thought, which means there’s been more time for water ice to have collected there. The conclusion, based on analysis of data from the SMART-1 mission, makes the crater a very attractive site for a lunar colony, according to scientists behind the study.

The moon was mistaken for a "bright, stationary" UFO which had been loitering for at least half an hour, by a confused local in South Wales who made a 999 call to the police. Today officers released a transcript in order to highlight the time wasted by unnecessary 999 calls. The bizzare conversation ran as follows: Control: "South Wales Police, what's your emergency?" Caller: "It's not really. I just need to inform you that across the mountain there's a bright stationary object." Control: "Right." Caller: "If you've got a couple of minutes perhaps you could find out what it is?...

As the full moon rises this Wednesday evening, June 18, many people will be fooled into thinking it's unusually large. The moon illusion, as it's known, is a trick in our minds that makes the moon seem bigger when it's near the horizon. The effect is most pronounced at full moon. Many people swear it's real, suggesting that perhaps Earth's atmosphere magnifies the moon. But it really is all in our minds. The moon is not bigger at the horizon than when overhead. The illusion will be particularly noticeable at this "solstice moon," coming just two days before summer starts...

UTRECHT, Netherlands - Utrecht police say a 21-year-old Dutch man is recovering after a "mooning" that went horribly wrong. A police statement says the man and two others had run down a street in Utrecht with their pants pulled down in the back "for a joke." It says that at one point the 21-year-old "pushed his behind against the window of a restaurant" that broke and resulted in "deep wounds to his derriere." The statement released Tuesday says police detained the three men after the incident Sunday morning. But the cafe owner decided not to press charges after the men...

May 22, 2008: Meet MIT professor of physics Maria Zuber. She's dynamic, intelligent, intense, and she's on a quest for the Grail. No, not that Grail. Zuber is the principal investigator of the Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory — "GRAIL" for short. It's a new NASA mission slated for launch in 2011 that will probe the moon's quirky gravity field. Data from GRAIL will help scientists understand forces at play beneath the lunar surface and learn how the moon, Earth and other terrestrial planets evolved. "We're going to study the moon's interior from crust to core," says Zuber. "It's very...

100 Explosions on the Moon A map of the 100 explosions observed since late 2005.Not so long ago, anyone claiming to see flashes of light on the Moon would be viewed with deep suspicion by professional astronomers. Such reports were filed under "L" ... for lunatic. Not anymore. Over the past two and a half years, NASA astronomers have observed the Moon flashing at them not just once but one hundred times. "They're explosions caused by meteoroids hitting the Moon," explains Bill Cooke, head of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office at the Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC). "A typical blast is...

NASA invites people of all ages to join the lunar exploration journey with an opportunity to send their names to the moon aboard the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, or LRO, spacecraft. The Send Your Name to the Moon Web site enables everyone to participate in the lunar adventure and place their names in orbit around the moon for years to come. Participants can submit their information at http://www.nasa.gov/lro, print a certificate and have their name entered into a database. The database will be placed on a microchip that will be integrated onto the spacecraft. The deadline for submitting names is June...

Will Jesus Christ return to Earth in the year 2015? And can studying NASA's website provide evidence for such a scenario? A minister who promotes the Old Testament roots of Christianity suggests a rare string of lunar and solar eclipses said to fall on God's annual holy days seven years from now could herald what's come to be known as the "Second Coming" of Jesus. "God wants us to look at the biblical calendar," says Mark Biltz, pastor of El Shaddai Ministries in Bonney Lake, Wash. "The reason we need to be watching is [because] He will signal His appearance....

PEORIA - Caterpillar Inc. doesn't plan to stop at being the No. 1 construction equipment maker in the world. It's aiming for the universe, with NASA as its partner. Caterpillar and NASA - the National Aeronautics and Space Administration - are getting closer to having the right earthmoving - er, moonmoving - equipment available to put on the moon in less than a decade to build habitats, roads and other infrastructure that could sustain life on the lunar surface. "We're pretty far along. I would say our partnership with Caterpillar is right on schedule," said Lucien Junkin, NASA's chief engineer...

Tokyo, Japan (SPX) Apr 23, 2008 The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and NHK (Japan Broadcasting Corporation) successfully captured a movie of the "Full Earth-Rise"*1 using the onboard High Definition Television (HDTV) of the lunar explorer "KAGUYA " (SELENE) on April 6, 2008 (Japan Standard Time, JST, all the following dates and time are JST.) The KAGUYA is currently flying in a lunar orbit at an altitude of about 100 km. An "Earth-rise," or the rising Earth over the Moon, was first captured by the Apollo project. The Earth rising image taken by the KAGUYA on November 7, 2007, was...

Stephen Hawking called for a massive investment in establishing colonies on the Moon and Mars in a lecture in honour of NASA's 50th anniversary. He argued that the world should devote about 10 times as much as NASA's current budget – or 0.25% of the world's financial resources – to space. The renowned University of Cambridge physicist has previously spoken in favour of colonising space as an insurance policy against the possibility of humanity being wiped out by catastrophes like nuclear war and climate change. He argues that humanity should eventually expand to other solar systems. But in a speech...

I'll grow marigolds on the moon, says scientistBy Roger Highfield, Science Editor Last Updated: 4:01pm BST 17/04/2008 Marigolds could be growing on the moon by around 2015, if an ambitious effort by scientists pays off. In what marks an important step towards helping lunar colonists grow their own food, a Ukrainian team, working with the European Space Agency, ESA, has shown that marigolds can grow in crushed rock very like the lunar surface, with no need for plant food. Marigolds were shown to survive in crushed rock The research was presented at the European Geosciences Union meeting in Vienna, by...

PASADENA, Calif. - New observations by a spacecraft suggest Saturn's second-largest moon may be surrounded by rings. If confirmed, it would the first time a ring system has been found around a moon. The international Cassini spacecraft detected what appeared to be a large debris disk around the 950-mile-wide moon Rhea during a flyby in 2005. Scientists proposed that the halo likely contained particles ranging from the size of grains to boulders. The finding was described in a study published in the March 7 issue of the journal Science. Unlike the rings around Saturn, Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune, the apparent...

This map shows the steepness of the terrain in the south polar region of the moon.In the craggy terrain around the Moon’s south pole, the deepest craters dip 2.5 miles beneath the surface while the peaks reach as high as the highest mountain in North America — a 37,000-foot change of elevation. That’s a bigger swing of topography than exists on the entire surface of Earth.On Wednesday, NASA released the sharpest-ever radar images of the south polar region, produced by its Goldstone Solar System Radar, located in the Mojave Desert of California.Some of the crater sides slant at 35...

Japan’s space agency today released the first high-definition video of the Earth rising and setting over the Moon's horizon. The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) said it had worked with the country's public broadcaster NHK to achieve the feat. The stunning footage, taken by Japan’s Kaguya probe, shows a distant Earth, a brilliant blue globe with a white top at Antarctica, slowly coming into view against the backdrop of pitch black space as the lunar surface revolves below the space craft. . . . Watch the Earth rise and set: http://timesonline.typepad.com/video/2007/11/earthrise-and-e.html

Scientists are priming two spacecraft to slam into the moon's South Pole to see if the lunar double whammy reveals hidden water ice. The Earth-on-moon violence may raise eyebrows, but NASA's history shows that such missions can yield extremely useful scientific observations. "I think that people are apprehensive about it because it seems violent or crude, but it's very economical," said Tony Colaprete, the principal investigator for the mission at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif. NASA's previous Lunar Prospector mission detected large amounts of hydrogen at the moon's poles before crashing itself into a crater at the...

The Moon will turn an eerie shade of red for people in the western hemisphere late Wednesday and early Thursday, recreating the eclipse that saved Christopher Columbus more than five centuries ago. In a lunar eclipse, the Sun, Earth and Moon are directly aligned and the Moon swings into the cone of shadow cast by the Earth. But the Moon does not become invisible, as there is still residual light that is deflected towards it by our atmosphere. Most of this refracted light is in the red part of the spectrum and as a result the Moon, seen from Earth,...

WASHINGTON: On matters of space flights and exploration, India has put its cards on table for the United States to see - literally. At a luncheon meeting on Wednesday hosted by a Washington DC think-tank on K-Street, better known as a hang-out for lobbyists than space buffs, the tables were all named after Indian space pioneers – Dhawan, Chandrasekhar, Sarabhai...

WASHINGTON: On matters of space flights and exploration, India has put its cards on table for the United States to see - literally. At a luncheon meeting on Wednesday hosted by a Washington DC think-tank on K-Street, better known as a hang-out for lobbyists than space buffs, the tables were all named after Indian space pioneers – Dhawan, Chandrasekhar, Sarabhai... It was an audacious display by a country that till recently was banished from the US space business by a rigid sanctions regime that didn't allow the transfer of a screw, let alone its drivers. But this week, a top-flight...

Renovated Moon Rocket Unveiled in Ala. Published: 1/31/08, 8:05 AM EDT By JAY REEVES HUNTSVILLE, Ala. (AP) - The renovated Saturn V rocket gleams like new, ready for its dedication. One would never know raccoons, birds and opossums were living in the 363-foot-long steel structure until recently. Once used for test firings at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, the rocket spent 35 years laying on its side outside the neighboring U.S. Space & Rocket Center, which includes hundreds of artifacts from the earliest days of the U.S. space program. The Saturn V was split into sections for display, but there...

NASA is wrestling with a potentially dangerous problem in a spacecraft, this time in a moon rocket that hasn't even been built yet. Engineers are concerned that the new rocket meant to replace the space shuttle and send astronauts on their way to the moon could shake violently during the first few minutes of flight, possibly destroying the entire vehicle. "They know it's a real problem," said Carnegie Mellon University engineering professor Paul Fischbeck, who has consulted on risk issues with NASA in the past. "This thing is going to shake apart the whole structure, and they've got to solve...

The Moon Survival Challenge HOW TO PLAY Imagine you are returning to the base ship on the sunlit side of the moon after carrying out a 72-hour exploration trip. Your small spacecraft has crash-landed about 200 miles from the base ship. You need to reach the base ship, in addition to your spacesuit, you were able to salvage the items listed below. Using what you know about the moon, rate each item in the above list according to how important it would be in getting you back to the base ship. Drag the items below up and down to prioritize...

Former N.Y. Mayor Rudy Giuliani on Friday pledged his unwavering support to return America to the moon and send astronauts to Mars, promising that if he were elected president space would be a pillar of his administration. "A strong NASA and a revitalized space program will be a priority for a Giuliani Administration from day one," he told a group of about 35 space industry and local officials gathered at space policy round table organized by the Economic Development Commission of Florida’s Space Coast. He then drove home his promise with a vow to close the gap between the retirement...

Quest to find water on the moon moves closer to launch NASA NEWS RELEASE Posted: January 14, 2008 MOFFETT FIELD, Calif. - Cameras and sensors that will look for the presence of water on the moon have completed validation tests and been shipped to the manufacturer of NASA's Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite. The science instruments for the satellite, which is known as LCROSS, departed NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field Calif., for the Northrop Grumman Corporation's facility in Redondo Beach, Calif. to be integrated with the spacecraft. A video file is available on NASA Television. LCROSS is...

MOON TWP. — A Moon Area High School physical education teacher and girls volleyball coach who has admitted to having sex with a 14-year-old male Moon Township freshman could face additional charges, Moon Police Chief Leo McCarthy said Monday. Beth Ann Chester, 26, of 2034 Swallow Hill Road, Scott Township, already is charged with unlawful contact with a minor, endangering the welfare of a child, criminal use of a communication facility, sexual abuse of children, corruption of minors and criminal solicitation. Charges were filed Friday, and she is being held in the Allegheny County Jail on $50,000 bond. McCarthy said...

Full moon near Mars on December 23 Earth & Sky Radio Series with hosts Deborah Byrd, Joel Block, Lindsay Patterson and Jorge Salazar. Sunday, December 23, 2007 For us in the U.S., the full moon is tonight. And if you look outside you’ll see this full moon near a blazing reddish light in our sky. It’s the planet Mars. Flying through space at 18 miles per second, Earth is about to go between the sun and Mars. Earth will pass between Mars and the sun tomorrow. So the distance between us and Mars is now about at its least for...

For us in the U.S., the full moon is tonight. And if you look outside you’ll see this full moon near a blazing reddish light in our sky. It’s the planet Mars. Flying through space at 18 miles per second, Earth is about to go between the sun and Mars. Earth will pass between Mars and the sun tomorrow. So the distance between us and Mars is now about at its least for this two-year period, and Mars won’t come anywhere near this close again until the year 2010. That’s why Mars appears bright in our sky. It’s as bright...

Moon is younger and more Earth-like than thought 20:13 19 December 2007 NewScientist.com news service Maggie McKee It's a good thing the Moon doesn't have any feelings to hurt. New research suggests it is actually 30 million years younger than anyone had thought, and that it is merely a 'chip off the old block' of Earth rather than being made up of the remnants of a Mars-sized body that slammed into Earth billions of years ago. That violent impact was thought to have taken place 30 million years after the solar system began to condense from a disc of gas...

rial It's like a James Bond film come to life. A company based on a tiny island in the British archipelago parachuted into San Jose on Thursday to become the first private team to enter a race to reach the moon by 2014 and thereby pocket most of a $30 million prize offered by Google. "We are challenging small private teams to do what only two governments have done before - land on the surface of the moon," said Peter Diamandis, head of the XPrize Foundation, which is administering the purse that Google offered in September. Entrants must fly a...

China's space experts have predicted that the country will publish the whole lunar 3D image in January next year. On Monday, China published its first moon image sent back by its lunar probe Chang'e-1, named after a mythical Chinese goddess who flew to the moon. The picture was pieced together from 19 images, each covering a width of 60 kilometers of the moon's surface. The area covered by the picture, about 460 kilometers in length and 280 kilometers in width, is located within a 54 to 70 degrees south latitude and 57 to 83 degrees east longitude on the moon,...

BEIJING -- China's space program has defended a photo of the moon's surface taken by its lunar probe as authentic, dismissing critics who suggested it had been copied from a similar image captured by an American orbiter. China last week presented the first picture taken by its Chang'e 1 lunar probe at a gala ceremony attended by Premier Wen Jiabao, part of the ruling Communist party's program of using the space program to instill national pride. However, critics posting on Chinese-language Internet sites questioned the image's authenticity, saying it was all but identical to a photo captured by a U.S....

(BEIJING) - China has dismissed Internet gossip that its first photo of the moon taken from a lunar orbiter might have been plagiarised from NASA, local media said on Monday. The country launched its first lunar probe, the Chang'e 1, in October and released a photo featuring a patch of grey moon surface splotched with craters last week, hailing the mission as a "complete success". But some Chinese Internet users have questioned its originality after comparing it with an almost identical lunar image from the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration in 2005. "There is absolutely no forgery," Ouyang Ziyuan,...

This file photo released by the China National Space Administration (CNSA) on Nov. 26, 2007 shows China's first picture of the moon captured by Chang'e-1, China's first lunar orbiter. (Xinhua Photo) BEIJING, Nov. 26 (Xinhua) -- China published the first picture of the moon captured by Chang'e-1, the country's first lunar probe, on Monday, marking the full success of its lunar probe project. The white and black picture, in a glass frame, was unveiled by Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao at the Beijing Aerospace Control Center. It shows a rough moon surface scattered with big or small round pits. The area...

Moons like the Earth's - which are formed in catastrophic collisions - are extremely rare in the Universe, a study by US astronomers suggests. The Moon was created when an object as big as the planet Mars smacked into the Earth billions of years ago. The impact hurled debris into orbit, some of which eventually consolidated to form our Moon. The Astrophysical Journal reports that just 5-10% of planetary systems in the Universe have moons created this way.

The moon formed after a nasty planetary collision with young Earth, yet it looks odd next to its watery orbital neighbor. Turns out it really is odd: Only about one in every 10 to 20 solar systems may harbor a similar moon. New observations made by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope of stellar dust clouds suggest that moons like Earth's are—at most—in only 5 to 10 percent of planetary systems. "When a moon forms from a violent collision, dust should be blasted everywhere," said Nadya Gorlova, an astronomer at the University of Florida in Gainesville who analyzed the telescope data in...

Chinese lunar orbiter to begin observations 11:33 20 November 2007 NewScientist.com news service David Shiga China's Chang'e 1 spacecraft entered lunar orbit on 7 November and is now ready to begin studying the Moon Chang'e 1, China National Space Administration China National Space Administration Chang'e 1 information, NASA China's lunar orbiter is set to begin switching on its science instruments. The spacecraft should help determine the thickness of the lunar soil and shed new light on the Moon's internal composition, which could help in understanding its origins. The China National Space Administration launched the Chang'e 1 spacecraft on 24 October...

A Japanese moon probe has replicated the famous Apollo-era "Earthrise" photograph with modern high-definition imaging ... ... The new Earthrise image shows our blue world floating in the blackness of space. Released on Tuesday, it is a still shot taken from video made by the craft's high-definition television camera ...

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and NHK (Japan Broadcasting Corporation) have successfully performed the world's first high-definition image taking by the lunar explorer "KAGUYA" (SELENE,) which was injected into a lunar orbit at an altitude of about 100 km on October 18, 2007, (Japan Standard Time. Following times and dates are all JST.) The image shooting was carried out by the onboard high definition television (HDTV) of the KAGUYA, and it is the world's first high definition image data acquisition of the Moon from an altitude about 100 kilometers away from the Moon. The image taking was performed twice...

An enormous impact basin located near the lunar south pole may have caused the Moon to roll over early in its history, new research suggests... Called the South Pole-Aitken (SPA) basin, it is 2500 kilometres wide and 12 kilometres deep and is thought to have been created about 4 billion years ago. Francis Nimmo of the University of California in Santa Cruz, US, believes the impact probably occurred near the Moon's equator. That is because the equator lies in the plane of most other objects in the solar system and therefore would more likely be in a hurtling space rock's...

BEIJING: It may be decades into the future but lunar scientists from China and other nations are already eyeing the immense potential of nuclear fusion from a precious mineral found on the Moon's surface, a top scientist said on Wednesday. "To explore the Moon is to solve the resource issues of the Earth," Qiao Xiaolin, an adviser to China's lunar exploration programme, said. "Nuclear energy is the most hopeful form," said Qiao, a professor at the Harbin Institute of Technology in north-eastern China. Scientists have studied the potential of the helium-3 isotope for use in nuclear fusion since the 1950s,...

China launches probe in Asian race for moon By Richard Spencer in Beijing Last Updated: 3:20pm BST 24/10/2007 China has launched its first lunar space probe as it battles with its rival Asian giants Japan and India to be the first to put a man on the moon. Probe will be the first MP3 player in space The Chang'e 1, named after a fairy who in Chinese mythology fled an unhappy marriage to live on the moon with her pet rabbit, was blasted into space at 6.05pm from Xichang, in south-west China. Thousands of local farmers had to be moved...

As cousins Travis and Chuckie Jones stroll off the South Broward High campus on school days, they're "gooned out." Wearing oversized T-shirts and low-riding jeans, they mimic the hard core look that gangsta rappers first popularized in the 1990s. The Jones boys' jean shorts, held up by belts, are hanging around their thighs and sag so low that you can't help but see the gym shorts they wear underneath. "I like saggin'," said Travis, a 15-year-old sophomore. For him, wearing baggy, ill-fitting jeans, is cool — and makes a strong statement. It's all about attitude. "It tells everybody to kiss...

Beijing Heats Up Space Race Against Japan This Week; Communist Party Pride Excerpt: Tomorrow evening, the China National Space Administration is scheduled to fire a "Long March" rocket from a launch site in the southwestern province of Sichuan. If all goes well, it will propel a satellite into lunar orbit, an important step toward China's goal of beating Japan to become the first Asian nation to put a man on the moon. Visitors check the Long March 3A rocket at the Xichang Satellite Launch Centre in southwestern China's Sichuan province last week. China plans to launch its first lunar orbiter...

Alan Bean, Apollo 12 lunar module pilot, Skylab mission II commander, Apollo-Soyuz Test Project backup commander, backup astronaut for the Gemini 10 and Apollo 9 missions and eventually head of the astronaut candidate operations and training group within NASA's astronaut office, spoke exclusively to Flightglobal.com about his time as an astronaut at the Autographica event in London on 12 October. A member of the third group of astronauts named by NASA in October 1963 he became lunar module pilot for what was the second Moon landing in November 1969. He and mission commander Pete Conrad explored the ocean of storms,...

Japan puts spacecraft into orbit around the moon BY STEPHEN CLARK SPACEFLIGHT NOW Posted: October 4, 2007 Japan's Kaguya probe slid into lunar orbit late Wednesday after a circuitous 20-day trek from Earth to begin more than a dozen science investigations designed to gain insights about the moon's history. The two-ton spacecraft fired its maneuvering thruster for between 10 and 20 minutes at about 2055 GMT (4:55 p.m. EDT) Wednesday, or in the predawn hours Thursday Japanese time, according to JAXA spokesperson Satoki Kurokawa. "We have completely done it and found no problem," Kurokawa said. Kaguya was initially set to...

Mooning a police officer was community activist Steven Lee Myrick's undoing.

Boeing has unveiled a radical redesign of NASA's plan to return to the lunar surface: save weight (and money) by saving gas for an orbital fill-'er-up, then shoot 15 times more material to the moon. Can the space agency jive with private space to get the new propellant depot off the ground? The rocket equation has always had one frustrating yet inevitable consequence: For every pound of payload headed for, say, the lunar surface, NASA needs hundreds more pounds of hardware and propellant during low Earth orbit—and many times that on the launchpad. For example, NASA’s planned Ares V vehicle...

The moon of Wednesday, Sept. 26 also carries the title of the Harvest Moon for those living in the Northern Hemisphere. The moon officially turns full when it reaches that spot in the sky diametrically opposite (180 degrees) to the sun in the sky. This moment will occur on Wednesday at 19:45 Greenwich Time (3:45 p.m. EDT or 12:45 p.m. PDT). Wednesday's full moon is the one that comes the closest to the September equinox so this year it falls in September, although in one out of three years this title can be bestowed upon the October full moon (as...

This is my first post here... hope I'm not screwing up tremendously or violating etiquette... I want to know the opinions of the people here on the concept of humanity moving out into space -- the moon, Mars, and beyond. Anyone have any thoughts to share? Do you feel strongly one way or the other? Neutral? I notice "space" doesn't even show up as a topic here... although we do have topics of "poetry" (which I applaud), "UFOs", and "Weird stuff." Cheers, Hal

September 15, 2007 Japan leads Asia’s race to the Moon Richard Lloyd Parry in Tokyo Asia’s race to the Moon began yesterday when Japan launched an unmanned lunar probe, the most ambitious mission of its kind since the United States’ Apollo missions of the 1970s. The lunar orbiter Kaguya, named after a Moon princess in a Japanese fairytale, was launched from Japan’s space centre on the small southern island of Tanegashima. The 55 billion yen (£240 million) Selenological and Engineering Explorer (SELENE), to give it its full name, will orbit the Earth twice before beginning a 20-day, 237,500-mile (380,000-km) journey...