Moon Daily
Moon Daily
89 articles in this category.
Moon Daily
Earth's Moon is unusually large compared with the planet it orbits, and the leading explanation begins with catastrophe: another world roughly the size of Mars slammed into the young Earth and blasted material into orbit.
Moon Daily
The Moon has been struck by billions of impactors over four billion years, but the one that hit near Einstein Crater yesterday is the only crater ever formed that comes with a full biography: we know who built it, what it weighed, when it left Earth, and where it hit to within metres
Moon Daily
The Moon is not airless: its exosphere holds helium, neon and argon at roughly one quadrillionth of Earth’s molecular density, and a single lander can briefly dominate the gas nearby
Moon Daily
Jupiter's moon Io is the most volcanically active body in the solar system, with hundreds of active volcanoes that can shoot sulphur plumes more than 500 kilometres above its surface — a landscape so extreme that early Voyager scientists initially mistook the plume images for camera errors
Moon Daily
Finding no evidence of life in Enceladus’s ocean could be almost as scientifically important as finding it — because a world with liquid water, internal heat, phosphorus and complex organic chemistry but no detectable biology would suggest that the ingredients for life are far easier to assemble than life itself
Moon Daily
We assumed the Moon was a geologically dead world, but Smithsonian scientists mapping its surface in early 2026 found more than a thousand previously unknown tectonic ridges — the Moon is still shrinking, still cracking, and still shaking
Moon Daily
In the Taurus-Littrow valley, where Apollo 17 landed in 1972, researchers confirmed in December 2025 that boulders tumbling downslope weren't dislodged by space rocks — they were shaken loose by moonquakes from a fault still slipping today, more than fifty years after astronauts walked there
Exo Life
The case for Enceladus as a potentially habitable world does not rest on speculation alone: sodium salts point to an ocean that has interacted with rock, molecular hydrogen reveals a potential chemical energy source, and phosphorus—the long-missing essential ingredient—has been detected in ice grains expelled from its ocean
Moon Daily
After Apollo astronauts tracked Moon dust into their cabin, it clogged seals, scratched their visors and left one crew member sneezing with “lunar hay fever”—yet they all agreed the dust smelled strangely like spent gunpowder
Moon Daily
When Apollo 11 came home, NASA sealed the astronauts, their spacecraft and their Moon rocks behind a biological barrier for 21 days in case lunar microbes existed — and Neil Armstrong celebrated his 39th birthday in quarantine behind glass
Moon Daily
In July 1969, Buzz Aldrin pulled a small plastic pouch of wine and a wafer from his personal preference kit inside the Eagle lander, poured the wine into a chalice given to him by his Presbyterian church in Texas, and took Communion on the surface of the Moon in the six hours before Armstrong opened the hatch — a private ceremony NASA asked him not to broadcast because of a lawsuit still pending from Apollo 8's reading of Genesis
Moon Daily
During Apollo 11’s final descent, the guidance computer flashed 1201 and 1202 alarms as it ran out of processing capacity — then repeatedly rebooted, discarded low-priority work and kept steering the lunar module towards the surface
Moon Daily
Cassini watched bright “islands” appear, disappear and reappear in Titan’s methane seas — and laboratory experiments suggest they may be fields of nitrogen bubbles fizzing out of solution as the alien lakes warm or mix
Moon Daily
Across Titan’s equator, winds have built dunes around 100 metres high and hundreds of kilometres long — but the grains are water ice coated in hydrocarbons that fell out of the moon’s orange atmosphere
Moon Daily