The cameras that Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong used were left on the moon, so Rise had to rely on archival NASA photos to understand the camera’s design.

The spacecraft was carrying the foundation’s first lunar library, a DVD-sized archive containing 30 million pages of information, human DNA samples, and thousands of tardigrades , those microscopic “water bears” that can survive pretty much any environment—including space .But when the Israelis confirmed Beresheet had been destroyed, Spivack was faced with a distressing question: Did he just smear the toughest animal in the known universe across the surface of the moon.

Water Bears Crash Onto the Moon, Cloudflare Ditches 8Chan, and More News. A crashed lunar lander left dehydrated water bears stuck on the moon, Cloudflare has ditched 8chan following this weekend's shootings, and electric cars enter the used car market.

Telescopes like Chandra can spot x-ray light coming from massive stars, much larger than our Sun, that are active for only a few million years, sputtering out gas and dust into space.

"It was amazing, and I realized that an eclipse is not just about the corona," he says, referencing the outer atmosphere of the sun that briefly peaks out from behind the moon during totality.

Zellner says the best way to settle the lunar cataclysm debate will be to visit craters where samples aren’t likely to have been contaminated by the Imbrium impact, such as the south pole or the far side of the moon.

Today marks the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing . Our lunar adventures are nowhere near done, though it might be a some time until we can all collectively share the awe that the world felt 50 years ago.

FaceApp isn't alone in the land of privacy concerns, a curious week-long satellite outage for Europe has finally ended, and WIRED did the math on what it would take to bike to the moon. Europe's week-long satellite outage is over—but serves as a warning.

If instead you pedaled for six hours a day, it would take four times as long—so that's almost three years, and it's not even all the way to the moon.

Like the original moon shot, these are big, hard problems that demand significant investments of time and money, along with innovative technology and thinking. The very term moon shot may not have originated with the Apollo missions, but in the Los Angeles Coliseum, in the 1950s.

The Best Remaining Prime Day Deals, a Deadly App, and More News. There are still lots of Amazon Prime Day deals to be had, hackers made a killer app to prove a point, and it's the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission.

Jupiter's moon Europa is like the Brigadoon of the solar system: an idyllic moon with an ice-covered ocean that may hide some form of life, even though plans to send a spacecraft there keep receding farther and farther away into the Jovian mists.

Teams of scientists develop game plans for capturing data months or years in advance of each one—as do amateur astronomers, working to create their own stellar images or execute their own studies—and it all comes down to a few precious seconds under the Moon’s shadow.

The Dragonfly mission will spend two years flying around the surface of Titan, studying the moon’s composition and searching for signs of life. On Wednesday, NASA announced it will send a spacecraft to the surface of Titan , Saturn’s largest moon and one of the leading candidates for finding extraterrestrial microbial life in our solar system.

Shortly after noon on July 20, 1969, as they orbited some 70 miles above the surface of the moon, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin detached their lunar lander from the Apollo 11 command module in preparation for descent.

Space Photos of the Week: Salt of the Jupiter Moon. Space photos and potato chips, bet you can’t have just one or two or three or four.

At one point there was talk of a rocket called Nova that would have had eight of the beasts on its first stage and might have launched a spacecraft heavy enough to land on the moon and then come back.

If NASA hoped to keep its moon-based instruments working on future Apollo missions, O'Brien concluded, it would need to study the matter of dust-spraying thoroughly.

Space Photos of the Week: The Shrinky, Wrinkly, Seismic Moon. These aren’t tiny temblors either: They measure up to 5 on the Richter scale, and if you’ve been through an earthquake you know that’s enough shaking to send you diving under a table or desk.

In a teleconference with reporters on Monday evening, NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine said the budget amendment was a "down payment" on what will be needed in future years to fund the program.

Bad Air Linked To Dementia, Bezos' Lunar Lander, and More News. Now, a wave of studies suggests air pollution is more harmful to us than previously thought, especially when it comes to dementia.

As detailed by Bezos, the plan is to send the lunar lander, called Blue Moon, to Shackleton Crater at the moon’s south pole. According to Bezos, the Blue Moon lander will be able to soft land on the lunar surface with up to 6.5 metric tons of payload weight.

Bill Finger's Ground Control draws on his own childhood fascination with the Apollo missions, shadowing a fictional character who longs to leave earth for space. "People have probably had a fascination with the moon since there were people," Finger says.

Engineers want to study the dark side of the moon, seeking out deposits of water ice there. If we can get robots and humans back up to the moon, they might be able to dig up that ice and convert it into fuel to power rockets.

This image shows the material around a super massive black hole in the center of a galaxy some 55 million light-years away. For the stuff around the black hole, it's not a visible light image.

If I assume he jumps like a normal human with an upward speed of 3 m/s (this would give a 0.6 second hang time), then the gravitational field would be 1.4 N/kg.

But Tuesday, at the fifth meeting of the National Space Council, Vice President Mike Pence doled out a big piece of information: When American astronauts go back to the moon, they will land at the lunar south pole.

Memes Are in Danger, but This Chat App Is Saving Lives. Mike Pence wants to send astronauts to turn ice into rocket fuel. On one hand, tech companies are stepping in to help with problems like prevent premature births .

(Astronauts pounded a “drive tube” into the lunar ground to pull a core of material, weighing about 800 grams.) Astronauts on Apollo-era moon-landing missions brought many rock samples down to Earth; these were vacuum-sealed and have never been exposed to our atmosphere.

But one thing was certain: on Orion’s first foray beyond Earth, a crew-less capsule would complete a six-day circuit of the moon; that’s the mission Bridenstine now says could launch atop a commercial rocket.