Tag: lunar
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NASA Finishes First Astronaut-Deployed Lunar Instrument Since Apollo
LEMS builds on a legacy of lunar seismic tracking that began with Apollo. Astronauts deployed a network of seismometers on the Moon’s nearside equatorial region between 1969 and 1972, and those instruments operated until 1977, recording about 13,000 moonquakes and other ground vibrations that helped scientists begin to understand the composition of the Moon’s interior.…
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NASA Invites India to Join Lunar Moon Base Programme
The meeting was attended by US Ambassador to India Sergio Gor and ISRO Chairman V Narayanan, who discussed existing and future avenues of collaboration in the space sector. The US Embassy shared a press release on the meeting on Wednesday. The discussions referenced the TRUST Initiative, launched jointly by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and US…
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South Korean Orbiter Photographs Fresh Lunar Crater After Falcon 9 Upper Stage Impact
The upper stage was a leftover piece of the rocket that launched Firefly’s Blue Ghost Mission 1 and ispace’s HAKUTO-R M2 Resilience, two lunar landers that lifted off in January 2025. The stage measured 13.8 meters long and weighed 4,000 kg. While the incident poses no harm to any missions currently in orbit or on…
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NASA Redirects Gateway Hardware Toward Lunar Surface Demonstration Missions
Gateway was a cornerstone of the Artemis architecture and represented years of international partnership commitments. Redirecting its hardware to surface demonstrations signals that NASA is moving toward establishing a permanent lunar presence on the ground rather than in orbit. The repurposing effort is being carried out in partnership with Northrop Grumman. The hardware in question…
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Spent Falcon 9 Stage Set to Strike the Moon on August 5, Offering a Live Test for Impact Science
The stage is a leftover from the launch that carried Firefly’s Blue Ghost-1 lander to the moon on January 15, 2025. That same flight also carried the Hakuto-R Mission 2 lander, called Resilience, developed by the Japanese company ispace. An international team led by William Jo, a graduate research assistant at the University of Texas,…
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Interlune Demonstrates 99% Pure Helium-3 Production With New Cold Capture Technology
The Seattle-based startup announced that its proprietary Cold Capture™ technology successfully extracted and purified helium-3 from Grade A helium. Rather than waiting until the 2030s for material from the Moon, the company says the system can immediately expand Earth’s supply of one of the world’s rarest industrial gases while validating the same core technology it…
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Carrier rocket for China’s Chang’e-7 lunar probe arrives at launch site
The carrier rocket for the Chang’e-7 lunar exploration mission has arrived at the Wenchang Spacecraft Launch Site in south China’s Hainan Province, the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) said on Monday. The Long March-5 Y14 carrier rocket will undergo assembly and testing at the launch site together with the Chang’e-7 lunar probe, which was transported…
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Voyager Wins $298M NASA Contract After Astrobotic Deal
Does Voyager’s $298M NASA Contract Validate the Astrobotic Acquisition? $298 million. That single NASA task order — awarded June 30, 2026, and announced publicly alongside the close of Voyager Technologies’ acquisition of Astrobotic Technology — may be the clearest signal yet that the Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) pipeline is maturing into a real, recurring…
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China’s Long March 10B Nails First Net Catch at Sea
Is China’s Net-Catch Booster Recovery a Viable Third Architecture? China’s state-owned China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC) recovered an orbital-class booster for the first time on July 11, 2026, catching the Long March 10B first stage in a tensioned cable net mounted to an offshore vessel — a recovery method distinct from both SpaceX’s…
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Artemis II Crew Briefs Congress on 10-Day Lunar Mission Success
How did NASA’s Artemis II crew perform during their 10-day lunar flyby mission? NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen briefed congressional staff Tuesday on their successful Artemis II mission, which completed a nearly 10-day cislunar space journey. The crew brought “Rise,” their zero gravity indicator from…