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A tiny 4.4-billion-year-old crystal has been confirmed as the oldest fragment of Earth's crust. The zircon was found in sandstone in the Jack Hills region of Western Australia. Scientists dated the crystal by studying its uranium and lead atoms. The former decays into the latter very slowly over time and can be used like a clock. The finding has been reported in the journal Nature Geoscience. Its implication is that Earth had formed a solid crust much sooner after its formation 4.6 billion years ago than was previously thought, and very quickly following the great collision with a Mars-sized body...

Daniel Saat, business development manager for SpaceIL, is reasonably confident that the lunar lander the Israeli spaceship organization is working on will beat out the competition and reach the moon, winning the big $30 million prize being offered by Google in its LunarX challenge. “Our intelligence sources tell us that Israel’s LunarX satellite is one of the two or three top contenders to win this contest,” Saat told The Times of Israel on Sunday. And he’s also pretty certain the 140 kilogram spacecraft will actually land safely on the moon and perform the stunts Google requires to award the prize...

Are you ready for some lunar versus planetary occultation action? One of the best events for 2014 occurs early this Wednesday morning on February 26th, when the waning crescent Moon — sometimes referred to as a decrescent Moon — meets up with a brilliant Venus in the dawn sky. This will be a showcase event for the ongoing 2014 dawn apparition of Venus that we wrote about recently. This is one of 16 occultations of a planet by our Moon for 2014, which will hide every naked eye classical planet except Jupiter and only one of two involving Venus this...

Landing on the moon is no easy feat, and five teams competing for the $30 million Google Lunar X Prize might just get a little more money to help them send their probes to the lunar surface. Astrobiotic, Moon Express, Team Indus, Hakuto and Part-Time-Scientists are all in the running to win "milestone prizes" later this year, Google Lunar X Prize officials announced today (Feb. 19). The total purse for the awards is $6 million with the teams competing in three different categories for the funds, X Prize officials said. Each company's ultimate goal is to ready its probe for...

Want this article to load more quickly? Read it in space. Hong Kong has the world's fastest Internet. Internet on the moon is 10 times faster. How do our lunar-exploring spaceships get buffer-free video? Lasers. NASA and MIT are shooting "lasers full of Internet" to a ship named LADEE that's exploring the moon's atmosphere. According to NASA, speeds have reached 622 megabits per second (Hong Kong tops out at 63.6). Right now, the agency is using a pulsed laser beam to transmit a pair of HD video signals to and from the moon. The 239,000 miles between the New Mexico...

The private spaceflight company Space X plans to build a rocket so big it would "make the Apollo moon rocket look small,"the company's CEO, Elon Musk, announced on "CBS This Morning"on Feb. 3. The huge rocket would ultimately send colonists to Mars, but what would SpaceX do in the meantime? The company's primary focus right now is giving NASA astronauts access to the International Space Station (ISS) on American vehicles, drastically lowering prices to Earth orbit versus what the Russians are charging, Musk said... This all begs the question: If SpaceX is going to build this gargantuan rocket on its...

Yutu entered a controlled hibernation mode despite mechanical problems on Jan. 24 to weather the 14-day lunar night cycle, but should have woken up days ago. China's mission control has yet to offer an official statement of failture, though it did report that Yutu did not wake up on schedule and was not responding to stimuli.

NASA is now working with private companies to take the first steps in exploring the moon for valuable resources like helium 3 and rare earth metals. Initial proposals are due tomorrow for the Lunar Cargo Transportation and Landing by Soft Touchdown program (CATALYST). One or more private companies will win a contract to build prospecting robots, the first step toward mining the moon. The contract will be a "no funds exchanged" Space Agreement Act, which means the government will not be directly funding the effort, but will receive NASA support. Final proposals are due on March 17th, 2014. NASA has...

The deadly tsunami on December 26, 2004 was the result of Saturn, Moon, Earth and the Sun falling in a straight line, claims a retired scientist of Department of Atomic Energy. Paramahamsa Tewari, who supervised construction of Narora and Kaiga atomic plants and authored controversial "space vortex theory", says his conclusion about the cause of tsunami stems from his theory that all spinning cosmic objects including the Sun develop electrical fields that repel each other. On the fateful day, Saturn, Moon, Earth and the Sun were perfectly aligned. As a result, Earth was subjected to the repulsive electrical force of...

It is set to become the largest rocket ever built, dwarfing the rockets that took man to the moon and paving the way for manned missions to Mars. Nasa today reveal stunning new pictures of its SLS (Space Launch System), which will eventually be capable of lifting 130 tonnes into orbit. The rocket will be used to ferry astronauts to the International Space Station, and to help us explore the outer reaches of the solar system. It is even hoped the craft could play a role in manned missions to Mars, being able to launch 'stepping stone' bases into orbit.

It is set to become the largest rocket ever built, dwarfing the rockets that took man to the moon and paving the way for manned missions to Mars. Nasa today reveal stunning new pictures of its SLS (Space Launch System), which will eventually be capable of lifting 130 tonnes into orbit. The rocket will be used to ferry astronauts to the International Space Station, and to help us explore the outer reaches of the solar system. It is even hoped the craft could play a role in manned missions to Mars, being able to launch 'stepping stone' bases into orbit....

It is a commentary on how adrift NASA space policy is when one considers that four years after President Obama made his "we choose not to return to the moon" speech that the space agency may be pivoting back to the moon. Paul Spudis, a planetary geologist and return to the moon advocate, has read the tea leaves and has seen the first, tentative steps toward a pivot back to the moon. Elon Musk, the space entrepreneur and political ally of Barack Obama, has recently conceded that expeditions to the moon would be useful. NASA is partnering with private companies,...

<p>Newly-minted Mayor of New York City Bill De Blasio is calling for school closures on two Muslim holidays and the Lunar New Year.</p>

Explanation: Where has the Yutu rover been on the Moon? Arriving in 2013 mid-December, the Chinese Yutu robotic rover has spent some of the past month and a half exploring Mare Imbrium on Earth's Moon. Because it uses solar power, the mechanical Jade Rabbit goes into sleep mode to endure the two-week long lunar night. Pictured above is a digitally created time-lapse composite panorama showing the region surrounding the Chang'e 3 lander, capturing the desk-sized rover in three positions. On the far right, Yutu is seen heading south to investigate greener pastures, likely never to return to its lander again....

OK this is the first I've heard of this. Is this true? I sure hope so.

America is preparing to land a robot on the moon for the first time in four decades. Nasa is looking for private partners to participate in the project that will see a new generation of rovers wandering across the moonÂ’s surface. The American space agency has set up a programme called Catalyst to exploit commercial opportunities offered by the moon. It believes that eventually there will be a market for commercial cargo trips to the lunar surface. "As Nasa pursues an ambitious plan for humans to explore an asteroid and Mars, US industry will create opportunities for Nasa to advance...

Explanation: There is a road that connects the Northern to the Southern Cross but you have to be at the right place and time to see it. The road, as pictured above, is actually the central band of our Milky Way Galaxy; the right place, in this case, is dark Laguna Cejar in Salar de Atacama of Northern Chile; and the right time was in early October, just after sunset. Many sky wonders were captured then, including the bright Moon, inside the Milky Way arch; Venus, just above the Moon; Saturn and Mercury, just below the Moon; the Large and...

The six wheeled Yutu rover, which means ‘Jade Rabbit’, has “experienced a mechanical control abnormality” in a new report by China’s official government newspaper, The People’s Daily. ‘Jade Rabbit’ was traversing southwards from the landing site as the incident occurred just days ago – about six weeks into its planned 3 month moon roving expedition. However very few details have emerged or been released by the Chinese government about Yutu’s condition or fate.

Having been briefed by top security advisers about North Korea's success in landing an astronaut on the Sun, President Obama today announced His decisive response. On January 21st, a satirical post "appeared at the Waterford Whisper News...." Mimicking typical North Korean propaganda, it proclaimed, THE STATE News Agency of North Korea has confirmed today that the country has become the first in the world to ever land a man on the sun. It reported that astronaut Hung Il Gong left for the sun on a specially designed rocket ship at approximately 3 am this morning. Hung, who traveled alone, reached his destination some four hours...

Explanation: Did you see the big, bright, beautiful Full Moon last Wednesday night? That was actually a Micro Moon! On that night, the smallest Full Moon of 2014 reached its full phase only a few hours from lunar apogee, the time of its the most distant point from Earth in the Moon's elliptical orbit. Of course, last year on the night of June 22, a Full Super Moon was near perigee, the closest point in its orbit. The relative apparent size of January 15's Micro Moon is compared to the June 22 Super Moon in the above composite image digitally...