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Can the little bot still function? India claims to have spotted the country’s Vikram lunar lander on the surface of the Moon days after the spacecraft presumably crashed during a landing attempt. India still has not made contact with the lander, which went silent moments before its scheduled touchdown, but Indian officials are hopeful that the lander might still function. “We are trying to establish contact,” Kailasavadivoo Sivan, the chairperson of the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) which oversees the lander, told Asian News International (ANI). “It will be communicated soon.” The Vikram lander is a key part of India’s...

Scientists have proposed a method to connect the Earth and the moon with a cable that will allow us to travel between them, but the European Space Agency isn't convinced Two astronomers from the University of Cambridge and the University of Columbia have proposed a plan for a kind of elevator between the moon and the Earth. Have you ever thought about what it would be like if we could just hop in an elevator, press a button, and head up to the moon? According to the scientists' calculations, it would be possible to construct such a structure using existing...

There may be life on the Moon after all: virtually indestructible beings that can withstand extreme radiation, sizzling heat, the coldest temperatures of the universe, and decades without food. These terrifying-sounding creatures aren't aliens but in fact microscopic Earthlings known as tardigrades, who likely survived a crash landing on the lunar surface by Israel's Beresheet probe in April, the organization responsible for their trip said Tuesday. Based on an analysis of the spacecraft's trajectory and the composition of the device the micro-animals were stored in, "we believe the chances of survival for the tardigrades...are extremely high," Nova Spivack, founder...

On July 3, 1969, just 17 days before Neil Armstrong and Ed Aldrin walked on the lunar surface, the USSR made its second attempt to test-fire its own moon rocket, known as N1. No official announcement about the secret mission had ever been made, but in subsequent passes over the Soviet test range in Tyuratam, Kazakhstan, U.S. spy satellites glimpsed utter devastation at one of the two launch pads known to host the moon rocket. The Soviet Union didn't know it at the time, but its hopes for reaching the moon also ended on that charred launch pad in 1969.

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,...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Several telescopes livestreamed the entire eclipse, and multiple people caught a glimpse of a small flash of light, seeming to come from around Lagrange crater. Because this event was seen by multiple observers separated by thousands of miles, the only conclusion is that something hit the moon, and its impact event was recorded on video. ...Further investigation will be necessary to determine the size of the meteoroid and obtain pictures of its impact crater, but for a basis of comparison, the LCROSS mission plowed a Centaur upper stage (2.2 tons) into the lunar surface at 2.5 km/s. This should have...

"As it turns out, the eclipse was even more special than most observers had noticed, as the Moon was actually struck by a meteorite while everyone was gazing in wonder at its rusty appearance. The meteorite itself wasn’t terribly large, and is estimated to have only been around 22 pounds. Still, its impact was large enough to be spotted by observers as well as the automated MIDAS system, and that’s pretty cool." I caught it as well with my own equipment. The impact flash appears at 1:23:04 in my video at about the 8 o'clock position near the edge of...