jatan23d
Moon Monday #213: Mission updates from the US, Japan, China, and this Indian
Our Moon as captured by the Blue Ghost lander after getting in lunar orbit. Image: Firefly Aerospace ...
jatan1mon
Indian Space Progress #24: High on docking, low on navigation. Cool new projects, same old budget
Pre-launch photo and renders of the SPADEX satellites. ISRO designed the satellites such that either could act as the chaser and the other as target for docking. Images: ISRO Chethan Kumar reported ...
jatan1mon
Critical scientific documents go missing from NASA-backed lunar community website
Screenshot of the inaccessible document archive on LEAG’s website as of February 10, 2025. The LEAG website is being reviewed in response to guidance given by NASA leadership. Screenshot of the LEAG ...
jatan1mon
Sharing Moon Monday’s approach to avoiding (Artemis) hot takes and speculative coverage
Some of you have been wondering and asking why I haven’t covered potential Artemis changes in the new US administration on my Moon Monday blog+newsletter. So here’s the thing. In the nearly three ...
jatan3y
How we test spacecraft before launch
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 ...
jatan3y
How NASA and India discovered water on our Moon
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 ...
jatan3y
India’s Mars orbiter completes six years at the red planet, but where is the science?
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 ...
jatan2y
Our two-faced Moon
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 ...
jatan5y
ISRO’s Chandrayaan 2 orbiter is creating the highest resolution map of the Moon
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 ...
jatan4y
Chang’e 5 landing site: Near the volcanic complex of Rümker
On December 16, China successfully completed the Chang’e 5 mission to bring samples from the Moon, their first such endeavor. The last time lunar samples were fetched was when the Soviet Union sent ...
jatan2y
How the Apollo missions transformed our understanding of the Moon’s origin
Where did our Moon come from? The origin of our cosmic neighbor is a fundamental question in planetary science. From Galileo’s first telescopic observations of the Moon to humans walking on its ...