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An asteroid shower thought to have struck the moon and Earth 800 million years ago may have helped trigger Earth's greatest ice ages, a new study finds... ...to learn more about ancient impacts on Earth, scientists investigated the moon, since craters are preserved well in the vacuum of space on the lunar surface. They investigated 59 lunar craters, each about 12 miles (20 km) wide or larger using the Japanese lunar orbiter spacecraft Kaguya. The researchers analyzed when these craters formed by examining the rings of rock ejected from the impacts which created them. Small meteoroids rain down on the...

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...

A Japanese spacecraft touted to be the largest aimed at the moon since NASA's Apollo era rocketed into space late Thursday on an ambitious mission to study the origins of Earth's nearest neighbor. The three-ton Kaguya lunar orbiter rode its H-2A rocket moonward at about 9:31 p.m. EDT (0131 Sept. 13 GMT), though it was Friday morning at Japan's island-based Tanegashima Space Center launch site. The probe was slated to circle the Earth twice before beginning a five-day trek to the moon, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) has said. Formally known as SELENE, short for SELenological and ENgineering Explorer,...