An artist’s impression of Chandrayaan 2’s lander and rover on the Moon. Chandrayaan 3 hardware is expected to look similar. Credit: ISRO ISRO is now preparing Chandrayaan 3 for a 2023 launch, with the ...

For all our abilities, humans are puny creatures on the scale of space. The Universe we exist in is just too vast and beyond our intuitive contemplation. As we start the new year with wishes and ...

The real Lord of the Rings is Saturn, a massive outer planet boasting a set of rings about 27 Earths wide. Being a gas giant like Jupiter, Saturn shares many of its attributes: a strong magnetic field ...

The Moon’s farside hosts the spectacular 312-kilometers wide Schrödinger crater with its crown-shaped mountain ring formed 3.8 to 3.9 billion years ago. The 312 kilometers wide Schrödinger crater, as ...

Before we begin, a note that my thoughts are with everyone affected by the fires in southern California as well as by last week’s 6.8-magnitude earthquake in Xizang, China. One thing that is notable ...

Our Earth as captured by the Blue Ghost lunar lander from Earth orbit on January 23, 2025. Image: Firefly Aerospace After NASA transferred operations of two of its key lunar orbital imagers to ...

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, ...

This diagram shows the approximate relative sizes of our solar system’s planets, moons and dwarf planets, Credit: Emily Lakdawalla / The Planetary Society Our solar system is a wondrous place.

A space mission is an immensely complex undertaking. Hundreds to thousands of experts from several distinct fields come together to build the thousands of parts and functions of a spacecraft. To ...

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 ...

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 ...

Put on your 3D glasses to see our Moon up-close in glorious depth. The Moon in 3D. To see it pop out, use any of the commercially available Red/Blue 3D glasses online or in physical stores. Credit: ...