Moon Daily
Moon Daily
111 articles in this category.
Moon Daily
In 2008, a team hauled 1,478 lunar data tapes and four obsolete drives to NASA Ames to recover pictures from the 1960s — and the laboratory where they restored those original views of the Moon in greater detail was an abandoned McDonald’s restaurant.
Moon Daily
Scientists have confirmed that a pit in the Moon’s Sea of Tranquillity opens into an underground cave, probably an ancient lava tube. Only tens of metres have been mapped, but separate modelling suggests that lunar gravity could support tubes kilometres wide—natural shelters large enough, in theory, to house entire settlements.
Moon Daily
The Moon’s planned first spaceport will have no runways, taxiways or gate announcements—NASA’s Gateway will follow an invisible orbit sculpted by the gravity of Earth and the Moon, and engineers have now published the first detailed strategies for keeping visiting spacecraft safely separated while they wait to dock.
Moon Daily
Classic Moon-formation simulations treated the colliding proto-Earth and Theia as strengthless fluids, typically producing a debris disk that assembled later—but when Southwest Research Institute researchers added temperature-dependent rock strength, one canonical simulation produced an intact Moon in roughly five hours.
Moon Daily
Moon dust may preserve a far longer record of cosmic history than Earth’s deep-sea deposits. A model validated against Apollo samples suggests metre-deep lunar soil could retain isotope signatures from supernovae and other stellar catastrophes dating back 80–100 million years, while the deep-ocean records currently used reach only about 10 million years.
Moon Daily
Across six Apollo landings, astronauts left a commonly cited 96 waste bags and containers on the Moon. Researchers have proposed retrieving one—not to clean up, but to discover whether any human microbes survived up to 57 years of lunar radiation, vacuum and extreme temperature swings.
Moon Daily
Buzz Aldrin saw Apollo 11’s flag topple in Eagle’s exhaust as the crew left the Moon in 1969. It has likely spent 57 years flat in the lunar dust, its nylon bleached or even destroyed by ultraviolet light—while orbital images show three later Apollo flags still casting shadows.
Moon Daily
Tonight, almost everyone across the continental United States can watch 96% of the Moon disappear into Earth’s darkest shadow—the deepest lunar eclipse anywhere on Earth until New Year’s Eve 2028. What remains may glow copper, deepen to chocolate brown or fade towards ashen grey, depending on the dust, smoke and volcanic aerosols currently suspended in Earth’s atmosphere—no two lunar eclipses look exactly alike.
Moon Daily
China’s Tianwen‑2 travelled roughly one billion kilometres over 400 days before returning the first close-up image of Kamoʻoalewa in July 2026—a tiny, fast-spinning asteroid perhaps only 20 metres wide whose unusual spectrum once made it look like a fragment of the Moon, although new observations have reopened that debate.
Moon Daily
Scientists have developed a method that could map water ice hundreds of metres beneath the Moon without extensive drilling—by measuring how moonquakes travel through the ground. Laboratory tests and simulations suggest ice-rich soil carries seismic waves two to three times faster than dry lunar regolith, while the current model extends to depths of about 800 metres.
Space Industry
China's water-hunting Moon mission was hours from launch on Sunday when the countdown stopped — the next window may not come until 2027
Moon Daily
China built Chang’e‑7 to place a rover and hopping probe near the Moon’s south pole, probably close to Shackleton Crater, where the hopper would venture from sunlight into a permanently shadowed cold trap and search for ice that may have survived since long before animals appeared on Earth.
Moon Daily
In January 1946, eleven years before Sputnik, a US Army radio crew in New Jersey bounced a signal off the Moon and heard it come back 2.5 seconds later, and that echo was the first time anything humans made had touched another world
Moon Daily
NASA scientists found the Moon's 18.6-year wobble will amplify ordinary high tides on U.S. coastlines starting in the mid-2030s — meaning some streets could start flooding on calm, sunny days for no visible reason
Moon Daily