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This Saturday marks the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission, when astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first people in history to walk on the Moon. But it’s also the anniversary of the a lesser known event—the first celebration of the Lord’s Supper on the Moon. Here’s are nine things you should know about the first communion service on the Moon. 1. In 1969, Edwin Eugene “Buzz” Aldrin Jr. was an elder at Webster Presbyterian Church, a congregation just outside of Houston, Texas. He told the lead pastor of his church, Dean Woodruff, that he had “been...

A new film, Hidden Figures, tells the story of the maths wizards who Nasa relied on. When John Glenn was waiting to be fired into orbit aboard Friendship 7 in 1962, there was one person he trusted with the complex trajectory calculations required to bring him down safely from his orbital spaceflight: Katherine Johnson, an African-American mathematician who worked in Nasa’s segregated west area computers division. “Get the girl, check the numbers,” Glenn said before boarding the rocket. “If she says they’re good, I’m good to go.” Johnson was one of three female African-American mathematicians known as the “computers in...

Introduction: This website replays the Apollo 11 mission as it happened, 50 years ago. It consists entirely of historical material, all timed to Ground Elapsed Time--the master mission clock. Footage of Mission Control, film shot by the astronauts, and television broadcasts transmitted from space and the surface of the Moon, have been painstakingly placed to the very moments they were shot during the mission, as has every photograph taken, and every word spoken. Interface: Upon starting the application, select whether to begin one minute before launch, or click "Now" to drop in exactly 50 years ago, to-the-second during the anniversary....

50 years ago this summer, the U.S. landed men on the moon. We’ve all seen the grainy video footage of Neil Armstrong. We’ve heard the recording of his famous words about the “small step" and the "giant leap." And in our imaginations, this unbelievable achievement has essentially been distilled down to that. But this accomplishment was the result of a massive team of people laboring for a decade on an effort unlike anything that came before it. And it was driven largely by a desire to keep the world from being enslaved to a most dangerous ideology. In this episode,...

50 years ago three American citizens crammed into a small metal can and soared away from their country – and their world – to land on a barren rock deeper in space.Their names – Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins - would be known to history forever as heroes that braved the great unknown for American, and indeed human, progress.Apollo 11 launched on July 16, 1969 from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The lunar module containing Armstrong and Aldrin landed on the moon’s surface on July 20 and the astronauts soon left back for Earth on July 22.The achievement of Apollo...

The researchers suggest that this type of world may a result of large “hot Jupiter” exoplanets migrating toward their host star. Exoplanet surveys have detected several such planets, and it’s believed that they likely formed at a greater distance from their respective stars and then slowly crept inward. When that happens, it’s possible that the change in gravitational forces would prompt large moons to break free from their existing orbits and become standalone worlds of their own. Computer simulations showed that this could indeed happen, and in those cases, the researchers believe we should call them ploonets. Remarkably, our own...

In the summer of 1962, Walter Schirra — who would soon become America's third man to orbit the Earth — walked into a Houston photo supply shop looking for a camera he could take into space. He came out with a Hasselblad 500C, a high-end Swedish import that had been recommended to him by photographers from Life and National Geographic. "He was sort of an amateur photographer," Jennifer Levasseur, a curator in charge of the Smithsonian National Air & Space Museum's astronaut cameras, says of Schirra. "Somewhere along the line, the decision was made that he could select what camera...

In a possible first, a giant, faraway planet may have been caught in the act of growing moons. Seen in an image from the ALMA Observatory in Chile, the young planet orbits a small star roughly 370 light-years away, and it appears to be swaddled in a dusty, gassy disk—the exact type of structure scientists think produced Jupiter’s many moons billions of years ago.

NASA is in final preparation stages for its Artemis 1 moon mission, which will be the first in its Artemis series of missions which intend to return an American man to the Moon, and bring an American woman to the surface of Earth’s natural satellite for the first time. The 335-ft tall mobile launch tower that will send Artemis 1’s Orion capsule to lunar orbit atop a Space Launch System rocket is now on the pad for its last round fo testing before the real thing. NASA’s Artemis 1 mission will fly the Orion crew capsule to space, where it’ll...

When a rocket carrying the first module of the International Space Station blasted off from Kazakhstan in November of 1998, NASA officials said that the station would serve as an orbiting home for astronauts and cosmonauts for at least 15 years. It's now been over 18 years that the station has been continuously occupied by people. The place is impressive, with more living space than a six-bedroom house, two bathrooms and a large bay window for looking down at Earth. NASA and its international partners have spent decades and more than $100 billion to make the station a reality. The...

NASA's lunar mobile launcher is one step closer to sending its first spacecraft to the moon. The launcher is now in final testing for Artemis 1 — an uncrewed test trip around the moon of the Orion spacecraft slated for 2020 or so — after making its last solo trip to the Kennedy Space Center Launch Pad 39B on June 27. The launcher will remain at the pad for two months before going inside the nearby Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) to join the Orion capsule and its rocket, called the Space Launch System (SLS). One day, this same system could...

European researchers and students are conducting a mock moon habitat trial under a glacier near the famous Matterhorn in Switzerland's Alps. Called IGLUNA, the demonstration is organized by the Swiss Space Center and the European Space Agency. Teams from across Europe arrived in the car-free mountain town of Zermatt, Switzerland, last week to set up their experiments, which include an ice-digging robot, a construction robot, an algae bioreactor and a hydroponic system for growing veggies. They've also built a habitat 8.5 feet (2.6 meters) tall buried deep in the ice. Zurbrügg, who is leading the habitat-construction team, said that his...

On the afternoon of July 20, 1969, Gary Latham ’65GSAS, a thirty-three-year-old geophysicist at Columbia’s Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory, arrived at NASA’s Manned Spaceflight Center (now the Johnson Space Center) in Houston to witness the fulfillment of thousands of years of curiosity and wonder: humanity’s first attempt to land men on the moon. Four days earlier, Latham, along with millions of others around the world, had stared rapt at a TV screen as a 363-foot-tall Saturn V rocket lifted off in a Zeusian thundercloud from Cape Canaveral. Atop the rocket was the Apollo 11 spacecraft, carrying astronauts Neil Armstrong, Edwin...

A real-time journey through the first landing on the Moon This website consists entirely of original historical mission material. Apollo 11 in Real-Time Included real-time elements: All mission control film footage All TV transmissions and onboard film footage 2,000 photographs 11,000 hours of Mission Control audio 240 hours of space-to-ground audio All onboard recorder audio 15,000 searchable utterances Post-mission commentary Astromaterials sample data

On July 20, 1969, American astronauts Neil Armstrong (1930-2012) and Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin (1930-) became the first humans ever to land on the moon. About six-and-a-half hours later, Armstrong became the first person to walk on the moon. As he set took his first step, Armstrong famously said, "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind." The Apollo 11 mission occurred eight years after President John F. Kennedy (1917-63) announced a national goal of landing a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s. Apollo 17, the final manned moon mission, took place in 1972.

A mysterious large mass of material has been discovered beneath the largest crater in our solar system—the Moon's South Pole-Aitken basin—and may contain metal from the asteroid that crashed into the Moon and formed the crater, according to a Baylor University study.

NASA says it will spend more than $250 million hiring private companies to transport scientific missions to the moon. These privately operated missions, part of the US space agency’s broader rush back to the moon, are designed to gather data about the lunar surface and pilot technologies for landing robotic explorers. Three companies—Astrobotic, Intuitive Machines, and Orbit Beyond—have been awarded contracts for missions into 2021. Orbit Beyond has the earliest target date for its mission, in September 2020.

For billions of years, the moon has been the Earth's visible companion - and source of intrigue. It is considered to be our planet's only natural satellite and widely accepted to have been created by "The Big Whack" - from debris left over after a huge impact between Earth and an asteroid. But what if the moon is not as natural as we believe and is actually man made? Researchers Christopher Knight and Alan Butler have spent years writing and compiling scientific theories that the moon may have been created by us or even aliens. They claim there are a...

Back when Wisconsin and western Russia once shared an address south of the equator, a violent collision in the asteroid belt blasted Earth with meteorites. The space rock smashup showered Earth with up to 100 times more meteorites than today's rate (a rock the size of a football field hits the planet about every 10,000 years). Yet, only a dozen or so impact craters have been found from the ancient bombardment 470 million years ago, during the Ordovician Period. Most are in North America, Sweden and western Russia. There are only about 185 known impact craters on Earth of any...

The Late Heavy Bombardment (LHB) period is the narrow time interval between 3.8 and 3.9 Gyr ago, where the bulk of the craters we see on the Moon formed. Even more craters formed on the Earth. During a field expedition to the 3.8 Gyr old Isua greenstone belt in Greenland, we sampled three types of metasedimentary rocks, that contain direct traces of the LHB impactors by a seven times enrichment (150 ppt) in iridium compared to present day ocean crust (20 ppt). We show that this enrichment is in agreement with the lunar cratering rate, providing the impactors were comets,...