There's a trailer out for a new science fiction film called Moonfall, to be released in early 2022, in which the moon is about to crash into Earth.A gravitational force pulls Earth and the moon toward each other.
Then, in the early 1900s, astronomers like Russia’s Nikolai Morozov* began observing newly developed high explosives and made a rather startling discovery: Large explosions differ from thrown rocks in a number of ways, but most ominously—at least for our species’ continued existence—they leave circular craters regardless of their angle of impact.
If you look at the moon with binoculars, you can see much more detail in the craters than with just your naked eye.With a pair of binoculars, you can see things that are otherwise too faint to detect with the naked eye in the dark sky.
Meanwhile, the spent Centaur rocket continued on its merry way through space and was pretty much forgotten—at least until August of this year, when astronomers using the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System (Pan-STARRS) in Hawaii spotted a mysterious object in a solar orbit that was due to pass close by Earth.
So when Hughes and the rest of the Magic Resistance Facebook group, which is about 6,000 people, attempt to bind President Trump to prevent him from doing harm to himself or others each month, they’re really participating in a long-running tradition.
And back in March, a paper by an international team of scientists suggested that astronauts setting up a base on the moon could use the urea in their urine as a plasticizer to create a concrete-like building material out of lunar soil.
Now, Thrift is back with Moon, a clock that measures one lunar cycle with each revolution.Scott Thrift's new Moon clock indicates the current phase of the lunar cycle.“We already have timepieces that show us how to be on time,” Thrift says.
The resulting material is a geopolymer, which has similar properties to concrete and could potentially be used to build landing pads, habitats, and other structures on the moon.Lunar regolith has chemical similarities to fly ash, which makes geopolymers an attractive option for building stuff on the moon.
Photograph: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science InstituteLooking down from a great height of one million miles, this view of Saturn’s north pole reveals its hexagon-shaped storm and different windy bands.Photograph: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science InstituteIn this deep dive, Cassini provided a breathtaking view from below Saturn’s rings.
The puzzling, fascinating surface of Jupiter's icy moon Europa looms large in this newly-reprocessed color view, made from images taken by NASA's Galileo spacecraft in the late 1990s.Photograph: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SETI InstituteOur final image in this series shows more chaos terrain in a region called Chaos Near Agenor Linea.
Photograph: NASAThe crew took this spectacular image of the Earth while returning from the Moon.Photograph: NASAAfter two intense days of what you might call extreme work-arounds, all three crew members of Apollo 13 landed safely back on Earth.
This past week, much of the world was treated to a Super Pink Moon and if you were one of many who missed out due to clouds or rain, don’t worry!Writers and poets love the moon, super or not, so this week we’ll offer a series of moon-related quotes and poems.
The retired NASA mathematician, who died Monday at the age of 101, calculated the trajectories of the agency’s first space missions, including John Glenn ’s 1962 spaceflight in which he became the first American to orbit the planet, and the first moon landing in 1969.
When the last person left the moon in 1972, few could have predicted that humans wouldn’t return for another 50 years.The agency is planning a crewed mission to the moon in 2024 , and this time it wants to stick around.
But maybe a better way to approach gravity is to think not about being stuck on Earth but about being weightless.“What you’re really doing when you’re experiencing gravity isn’t being heavy in your chair, it’s falling weightlessly in the gravitational field,” says astrophysicist Janna Levin.
Photograph: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research InstitutePerhaps the most famous moon in the solar system (aside from our own) is Jupiter’s Europa.Photograph: NASA/JPL/Space Science InstituteIn 1989 after visiting the outer planets, Voyager 2 flew past Neptune and its large moon Triton.
The image, developed in NASA’s photographic laboratories immediately after the mission and autographed by Bean himself, is one of more than 200 prints peddled by the auction house in its first-ever space photos sale, taking place today.
Photograph: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASIThe photos Cassini sent back during its 13 years at Saturn are so stunning, they can make this already beautiful planet seem like something out of fairy tales.Photograph: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASIOn September 15, 2017, before Cassini set a death course into Saturn, it took one last photo of Titan.
Moving radio observatories to the moon wouldn’t require turning the entire lunar farside into a radio quiet zone, but it would guarantee that at least some portions of the moon are preserved for radio astronomy and the hunt for extraterrestrial intelligence.
In the team’s most recent creation, For All Mankind, Moore and company introduce audiences to a new history of the space program: One where the Russians made it to the moon first; where Ted Kennedy cancelled his party on Chappaquiddick; and where national heroes like Buzz Aldrin and Wernher von Braun become people, wracked with their own insecurities, flaws, and humanity.