The Chinese lunar probe Chang’e-3 has successfully touched down on the Moon in the Sinus Iridum crater (also known as the Bay of Rainbows) and its rover Yutu (Jade Rabbit) has sent back its first pictures of the surface of the Moon. The lunar probe began its soft-landing maneuvers at 9pm Saturday (Beijing time) and […]
The Hubble Space Telescope has discovered water vapor erupting from the south pole of Jupiter’s moon Europa. Astronomers have long suspected that Europa harbors a liquid ocean beneath its icy crust, and the new images are the first observational evidence of the existence of water on the moon. But whether the water is coming from […]
A report in Current Biology offers the first scientific evidence that humans are affected by the geophysical rhythms of the moon. “The lunar cycle seems to influence human sleep, even when one does not ‘see’ the moon and is not aware of the actual moon phase,” says report author Christian Cajochen, from the University of […]
The Hubble Space Telescope has uncovered a fifth moon – dubbed P5 – orbiting the icy dwarf planet Pluto. The new-found moon, visible as a speck of light in Hubble images, is irregular in shape and estimated to be between 10-25 kilometres across. It is in a 95,000 kilometre-diameter circular orbit around Pluto and is […]
When Apollo astronauts returned from the moon 40 years ago, they brought back moon rocks to undergo analysis, and one of the big questions was whether there was water to be found in the lunar rocks and soils. But most of the rock boxes containing the lunar samples had leaked. This led the scientists to […]
In the early hours of September 3, the European Space Agency’s SMART-1 spacecraft crashed into the lunar surface, the deliberate impact ending its momentous moon mapping mission. Launched in September 2003, and after an extended momentum-building trajectory around Earth, the Swedish built SMART-1 reached its destination orbit around the moon in November 2004. SMART-1’s moon […]
