Starry Skies Network

NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC), overseen by ASU professor Mark Robinson, has been busy taking high resolution photos of the Moon’s surface. Most recently, LROC captured stunning photos of the Moon’s enormous Aristarchus crater. Wired Science reporter and freelance journalist Adam Mann posted a story on Wired’s website today about this crater, which is two times as deep as the Grand Canyon.

“Looting, that would be pretty bad,” says archaeologist Beth O’Leary of New Mexico State University in Las Cruces. Looting is the bane of archaeological sites and O’Leary has spearheaded efforts to declare moon landing sites as historic preserves or national parks, seeking to head off similar depredations before before tourists leave Earth for the moon. “I put landing people on the moon up there with creating fire as a technological achievement.”

About one in 10 rocky planets around stars like our Sun may host a moon proportionally as large as Earth’s, researchers say.
Our Moon is disproportionately large – more than a quarter of Earth’s diameter – a situation once thought to be rare.

A team of NASA-funded researchers has measured for the first time water from the moon in the form of tiny globules of molten rock, which have turned to glass-like material trapped within crystals. Data from these newly-discovered lunar melt inclusions indicate the water content of lunar magma is 100 times higher than previous studies suggested.

The moon is not exactly the shrivelled prune of a satellite we once thought. Beneath its dusty surface there is water – quite a lot of it. A recent analysis of lunar rocks reveals that they have the same concentration of water as the Earth’s upper mantle, the layer of near-molten rock just beneath the crust. The findings leave traditional thinking about how the moon formed in deep water.

UCLA lunar researchers were planning on collaborating with Chinese scientists this summer to better understand the moon’s temperature, but a recent congressional act might stand in the way.

Written on the moon’s weary face are the damages it has endured for the past 4-1/2 billion years. From impact craters to the dark plains of maria left behind by volcanic eruptions, the scars are all that remain to tell the tale of what happened to the moon. But they only hint at the processes that once acted—and act today—to shape the surface.

UT researchers have recently uncovered the probable source of water deposits left on the lunar surface.
Lawrence Taylor, professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Science, has already achieved great acclaim in the scientific community, proving the existence of abundant water deposits on the Moon. His new findings indicate that some of this water originated from various comets’ collision with the moon.

The Moon is Earth’s only satellite, a quarter of its size, moving around our home planet in cold and lifeless isolation, in an orbit that increases an inch and a half a year.

“The Dark Side of the Moon” made a memorable album title for the rock group Pink Floyd in 1973. But the term is a common misnomer. The moon rotates like Earth, but so slowly it keeps one side facing Earth though synchronous rotation. When we have new moon on Earth, the lunar far side is fully illuminated; there is no “dark side.”

A NASA lunar probe’s meticulous observations are allowing scientists to create the most precise and complete map of the moon’s surface to date, researchers said.

China on Monday unveiled photos taken by its lunar probe of the moon’s Sinus Iridium, the area marked out for the nation’s first landing, highlighting the success of the mission so far.

For the first time in decades, astronomers have identified a new rock type on the moon. Tucked away on the lunar farside, unseen until a space probe spotted its odd mineralogy, are a few deposits of what is probably ancient material that originated deep inside the moon.