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 ...

When Mangalyaan entered orbit around Mars, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi had boasted that at ~$70 million, the mission was cheaper than the Hollywood film Gravity, and even an auto rickshaw ...

A not-to-scale representation of ISRO’s Venus orbiter mission Shukrayaan. Credit: ISRO Edit in October 2024: I’ve written a new, much longer article on ISRO’s Venus Orbiter after India approved the ...

A space mission is an immensely complex undertaking. Hundreds to thousands of people from several distinct fields of expertise must come together to orchestrate thousands of moving parts and functions ...

NASA’s successful touchdown of its $2.7 billion Perseverance rover in Mars’ Jezero crater on February 18 is a triumphant culmination of four decades of increasingly challenging landings on the Red ...

A space mission is an immensely complex undertaking. Hundreds to thousands of experts from several distinct fields come together to build the thousands of parts and functions of a spacecraft. To ...

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 ...

When dabbling with the laws of motion in the 17th century, Isaac Newton first realized that it’s indeed possible to send an object out of Earth, into space. As long as an object is shot away from ...

Update in January 2024: KPLO has not only been successfully capturing beautiful high resolution images of the Moon’s surface but uniquely studying it for various scientific purposes. On August 5, 2022 ...

Unlike the millions of years it takes for most mountains on Earth to form, lunar mountains crop out near-instantly, geologically speaking. Earth’s mountains primarily form when two colliding plates of ...

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 ...