Plus: Scientific archives as your Wild Card, a Draw Four for Boeing, UNO Reverse with Japan, and a stack of Artemis updates.

When Mangalyaan entered orbit around Mars, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi had boasted that at ~$70 million, the mission was cheaper than the Hollywood film Gravity, and even an auto rickshaw ...

The next five years of exploring our Moon will not just be marked by the upcoming armada of robotic landers but also the sheer diversity of mobile explorers they’ll deploy. Here’s a look at all the ...

Unlike the millions of years it takes for most mountains on Earth to form, lunar mountains crop out near-instantly, geologically speaking. Earth’s mountains primarily form when two colliding plates of ...

November of 2011 was a particularly exciting time for planetary scientists. Russia had launched its Phobos-Grunt spacecraft to land on Mars’ moon Phobos, the first ever such attempt. The spacecraft ...

For most of the 20th century, scientists thought the Moon’s surface was bone-dry. The 382 kilograms of rock and soil samples brought by the Apollo missions to Earth attested to this. When they did ...

Scientists have long suspected water might exist on the Moon, but exactly how much there was and where it was located has been the source of much debate. In a 1967 paper, scientist Harold Urey mocked ...

When we think about craters on the Moon, we usually think of ones that can be seen with a telescope or in images sent by spacecraft around the Moon. But there are also ones we can only see with a ...

The Chandrayaan 3 spacecraft stack is seen here mounted in an acoustic chamber. The stack comprises the lander and an orbiter for co-flight until lunar orbit. Credit: ISRO The 1752-kilogram ...

Unlike traditional missions, these CLPS missions are fully built, operated and managed by their companies, with minimal oversight from NASA. The agency only dictates preferences for the landing sites, ...

December 2021 update: Several research results have come out of the Chandrayaan 2 orbiter’s data since I wrote this article almost 2 years ago. India’s space organization, ISRO, launched Chandrayaan 2 ...

The farside also lacked the Moon’s familiar dark splotches. Formed as a result of active volcanism over 3 billion years ago, it was anyone’s guess why dark lava plains cover about 31% of the nearside ...