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SPACE: Water Bears on the Moon!

tardigrade - deposit photos

When you look up at the moon, there may now be a few thousand water bears looking back at you. The Israeli spacecraft Beresheet crashed into the moon during a failed landing attempt on April 11. In doing so, it may have strewn the lunar surface with thousands of dehydrated tardigrades, Wired reported yesterday (Aug. 5). Beresheet was a robotic lander. Though it didn’t transport astronauts, it carried human DNA samples, along with the aforementioned tardigrades and 30 million very small digitized pages of information about human society and culture. However, it’s unknown if the archive — and the water … Read more

SPACE: Meet the Ploonets!

Ploonet - NASA

What do you call a runaway exomoon with delusions of planethood? You call it a “ploonet,” of course. Scientists had previously proposed the endearing term “moonmoons” to describe moons that may orbit other moons in distant solar systems. Now, another team of researchers has coined the melodious nickname “ploonet” for moons of giant planets orbiting hot stars; under certain circumstances, these moons abandon those orbits, becoming satellites of the host star. The former moon is then “unbound” and has an orbit like a planet’s — ergo, a ploonet. Ploonets — and all exomoons, for that matter — have yet to … Read more

SPACE: There’s Something Big Lurking Beneath the Moon’s South Pole

moon anomaly - NASA

Earth’s moon is hiding an enormous secret on its storied dark side. Deep below the moon’s South Pole-Aitken basin (the largest preserved impact crater anywhere in the solar system), researchers have detected a gargantuan “anomaly” of heavy metal lodged in the mantle that is apparently altering the moon’s gravitational field. According to a study of the mysterious blob, published April 5 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, the anomaly may be the heavy leftovers of the asteroid that crashed into the far side of the moon and created the giant South Pole-Aitken crater some 4 billion years ago. However, all … Read more

SPACE: Watch The First Solar Eclipse Ever Filmed

Solar Eclipse

Magicians are known for making things disappear, but when the sun vanished from the sky on May 28, 1900, it happened not through a sleight of hand, but because of a solar eclipse. There was magic in the air that day after all — movie magic. Nevil Maskelyne, a performing magician who also happened to be a pioneering filmmaker, preserved the spectacular event — as the moon passed between Earth and the sun — on celluloid, from a location in North Carolina. More than a century later, Maskelyne’s film of the eclipse has been digitally scanned and restored in a … Read more

SPACE: The Moon is Flashing Us

moon - pixabay

There’s something flashing us on the moon, and we don’t know what it is. But that might be about to change. We have known about the mysterious flashes since at least the late 1960s, when the astronomers Barbara Middlehurst and Patrick Moore reviewed the scientific literature and found nearly 400 reports of strange events on the moon. Small regions of the lunar surface would get suddenly brighter or darker, without obvious explanation. The scientists’ survey of the flashes and dimming, which they called “lunar transient phenomena,” was published in the journal Science on Jan. 27, 1967. (Later, astronomers flipped the … Read more

Take a Walk On the Dark Side (of the Moon) – Live Science

Looking up at the silvery orb of the Moon, you might recognize familiar shadows and shapes on its face from one night to the next. You see the same view of the Moon our early ancestors did as it lighted their way after sundown. Only one side of the spherical Moon is ever visible from Earth — it wasn’t until 1959 when the Soviet Spacecraft Luna 3 orbited the Moon and sent pictures home that human beings were able to see the “far side” of the Moon for the first time. A phenomenon called tidal locking is responsible for the … Read more

SPACE: The Moon is Totally Cracked

Is the moon all it’s cracked up to be? Yes — and then some. New analysis of the lunar surface reveals that it’s far more fractured than once thought. Since the moon formed 4.3 billion years ago, asteroid impacts have scarred its face with pits and craters. But the damage goes far deeper than that, with cracks extending to depths of 12 miles (20 kilometers), researchers recently reported. Though the moon’s craters have been well-documented, scientists previously knew little about the upper region of the moon’s crust, the megaregolith, which sustained the bulk of the damage from space rock bombardment. … Read more

China Plans to Build a Base on the Moon

Earth - pixabay

China plans to build a scientific research station on the moon in “about 10 years,” according to the state news agency Xinhua. The China National Space Administration (CSNA) intends to build the research station in the region of the moon’s south pole, Zhang Kejian, head of CSNA, said in a public statement, Xinhua reported. That’s a bit of a departure from the six successful NASA Apollo moon landings, which took place closer to the moon’s equator between 1969 and 1972. Details of China’s long-term lunar plans are still sketchy, but CSNA has made significant steps toward lunar exploration. Earlier this … Read more

SPACE: Neptune’s New Moon Reveals Its Secrets

Hippocamp moon - NASA

A faint and frigid little moon doesn’t have to go by “Neptune XIV” anymore. Astronomers have given a name — “Hippocamp” — to the most recently discovered moon of Neptune, which also formerly went by S/2004 N1. They’ve figured out how big the satellite is as well, and teased out some interesting details about its past, a new study reports. A team led by Mark Showalter, of the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute in Mountain View, California, announced the existence of S/2004 N1 in 2013. The scientists did so after analyzing photos taken by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope between … Read more

SPACE: Earth Kisses the Moon

The wispy outermost layer of Earth’s atmosphere extends much deeper into space than scientists realized — deep enough that the moon orbits through it. Earth’s geocorona is a sparse, little-understood collection of hydrogen atoms loosely bound by gravity to our planet. This atmospheric region is so thin that on Earth we’d call it a vacuum. But it’s important enough, and powerful enough, to mess with ultraviolet telescopes due to its habit of scattering solar radiation. And researchers, looking at old data from the 1990s, now know that it extends up to 400,000 miles (630,000 kilometers) above the planet’s surface. That’s … Read more