And more such interesting Moon exploration updates from China’s National Space Day on April 24. It was in late 2023 that China opened up sample research applications to foreign scientists. The process ...

Multi-agency instruments planned to be on the LUPEX rover. Image: JAXA / M. Ohtake, et al. India approved the joint ISRO-JAXA Chandrayaan 5 / LUPEX mission to drill and analyze water ice on the Moon.

For most of the 20th century, scientists thought the Moon’s surface was bone-dry. The 382 kilograms of rock and soil samples brought by the Apollo missions to Earth attested to this. When they did ...

India has formally approved the joint ISRO-JAXA Chandrayaan 5 (LUPEX) mission to study water ice on the Moon’s south pole. The mission and its approval are notable in many ways as we’ll see below.

Where did our Moon come from? The origin of our cosmic neighbor is a fundamental question in planetary science. From Galileo’s first telescopic observations of the Moon to humans walking on its ...

Unlike traditional missions, these CLPS missions are fully built, operated and managed by their companies, with minimal oversight from NASA. The agency only dictates preferences for the landing sites, ...

The farside also lacked the Moon’s familiar dark splotches. Formed as a result of active volcanism over 3 billion years ago, it was anyone’s guess why dark lava plains cover about 31% of the nearside ...

When we think about craters on the Moon, we usually think of ones that can be seen with a telescope or in images sent by spacecraft around the Moon. But there are also ones we can only see with a ...

Updates on CLPS, ispace, Artemis, Chandrayaan 4, and more. Read to the end for a fact check on an op-ed. How long do you think this hold is going to be? We don't have a lot of gas to play with," one ...

The real Lord of the Rings is Saturn, a massive outer planet boasting a set of rings about 27 Earths wide. Being a gas giant like Jupiter, Saturn shares many of its attributes: a strong magnetic field ...

Cassini spacecraft’s views of huge water plumes erupting from Enceladus’ south pole. Credit: NASA JPL When Cassini flew through Enceladus’ plumes between 2008 to 2015, its mass spectrometer found a ...

The Sun rises in the east and sets in the west, except if you are on Venus. That’s because it rotates on its axis in the opposite direction from other planets, and nobody knows why. This is just one ...