Not since the 1960s have we witnessed such appetite for space missions. Here’s what to expect in the year ahead, from commercial launches to Chinese ambitions
As NASA gets ready to return to the Moon in 2024, the space agency is working on new designs for a lunar lander, including a futuristic design it shared on Monday.
It is a well-known astronomical convention that Earth has only one natural satellite, which is known (somewhat uncreatively) as “the Moon”. However, astronomers have known for a little over a decade that Earth also has a population of what are known as “transient Moons”. These are a subset of Near-Earth Objects (NEOs) that are temporarily scooped up by Earth’s gravity and assume orbits around our planet.
NASA will send a golf cart-sized robot to the moon in 2022 to search for deposits of water below the surface, an effort to evaluate the vital resource ahead of a planned human return to the moon in 2024 to possibly use it for astronauts to drink and to make rocket fuel, the U.S. space agency said on Friday.
China has published a new image showing the strange substance found by Yutu-2 on the dark side of the Moon.
Only really, really little astronauts need apply
A lunar rover which will explore the moon on foot in 2021 was unveiled in London on Thursday.
A decade after NASA sent a rocket crashing into the moon’s south pole, spewing a plume of debris that revealed vast reserves of ice beneath the barren lunar surface, the space agency is racing to pick up where its little-remembered project left off.
A recent Chinese mission has revealed more about the South Pole Aitken basin
You’d think spotting a crashed lander on the surface of the Moon would be easier, but NASA is discovering that the hunt can be trickier than you might expect. Searches for India’s Chandrayaan-2 lander, Vikram, have turned up empty-handed so far, with the failed mission so far escaping the high-resolution eye of NASA’s lunar satellites.
