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30 stories from Planck Standard. Latest: September 17, 2026.
An Intuitive Machines image specialist spotted the fresh scar on Oct. 24, 2025, and 'dropped everything.' The blast churned the surface over 66 miles and left a 4-mile cold spot. The IAU has named it McGetchin.
The Moon has no air, no water and no plate tectonics, so a micron-sized grain of alien ceramic or graphene could survive there for a billion years. A trillion grains per cubic meter means the search would have to be run by AI.
A new feasibility study in Frontiers in Space Technologies finds power is easy at the lunar poles and water is the wall. A village of 1,000 could last for centuries; the 'self-growing cities' pitched by Musk and Bezos could not.
Southwest Research Institute modeling that accounts for how strong the colliding rock actually was found the Moon can form intact almost immediately — if Earth and Theia were cold enough.
A new tidal model run out over 4.5 billion years finds the missing Venusian moon needs no catastrophe to explain. The planet killed it, in as little as 30 million years.
The 8,800-pound Falcon 9 second stage that launched two lunar landers in January 2025 finally came down Wednesday, near the far-side craters Einstein and Bell.
WatchThe discarded Falcon 9 upper stage that launched two private lunar landers in January 2025 drifted for eighteen months and hit near Einstein Crater at 6:35 UTC Wednesday. Nobody photographed the collision, but the Very Large Telescope read its chemical signature.
Ice-rich lunar soil carries seismic waves two to three times faster than dry soil, a University of Maryland-led team reports. China's Chang'e-7 lands a seismometer near Shackleton Crater later this year, and it can test the idea.
Artemis III has been rewritten as a dress rehearsal: three rockets launching in quick succession in 2027, two prototype landers, and a crew that stays in Earth orbit the whole time.
Samples from the Moon's far side show solar-wind particles struck it harder than the near side — because Earth's magnetic field slows the stream that reaches the hemisphere facing us.
Southwest Research Institute scientists link the breakup of the Eulalia parent body near a Jupiter 'escape hatch' to an ancient wave of impacts that may have reshaped early Earth's environment.
From compact power for the Moon's shadowed craters to systems for servicing spacecraft in orbit, the agency is pairing its labs and expertise with private industry in a $60 million-plus collaboration.
Astrobotic, Firefly Aerospace and Intuitive Machines will fly four robotic missions in late 2028, each carrying the same trio of instruments to scout dust, radiation and navigation for a permanent human outpost.
Methane from spacecraft engines can 'hop' across the lunar surface and pile up in the very frozen craters scientists hope will preserve pristine clues to life's origins, researchers say.
A new proposal argues that rock and soil returned from Mars and beyond should be screened at a robotic facility on the Moon first — casting the lunar surface as humanity's first line of biological defense.
Veteran spacefarers Randy Bresnik, Luca Parmitano, Frank Rubio and rookie Andre Douglas will fly the mission, targeted for as soon as late 2027, that aims to land humans near the lunar south pole.
Researchers demonstrate that compact satellite-based instrument could reveal complete elemental composition across entire lunar surface.
Tokyo researchers show lightweight detector could identify key elements across entire lunar surface in two-year mission.
The four-person NASA crew traveled 252,756 miles from Earth — farther than any humans since 1972 — completing the first crewed lunar mission in more than five decades.
The four-person NASA crew traveled 252,756 miles from Earth — 4,111 miles beyond the Apollo 13 record — and photographed the lunar far side that no human eyes had ever directly seen.
NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen returned Thursday after a 10-day mission that took humans farther from Earth than any crew since Gene Cernan left the Moon 54 years ago.
22-meter-wide impact discovered by comparing orbital images reveals Moon is still actively changing from ongoing asteroid and comet strikes.
NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and CSA's Jeremy Hansen reached 252,756 miles from Earth — farther than any humans in history — before beginning their return journey with a Pacific splashdown scheduled for Friday.
The lunar mission has elicited deep feelings among Americans, particularly in Houston where mission control coordinates the historic return to the Moon.
The four-member Artemis II crew, now closer to the Moon than Earth on Flight Day 3, are sending back deep-space photographs of Earth while preparing for a historic lunar flyby and a record-breaking distance from home.
NASA's most ambitious mission since Apollo carries crew farther from Earth than any humans in over 50 years.
WatchFour astronauts aboard the Orion spacecraft "Integrity" successfully lifted off from Kennedy Space Center, beginning a 10-day mission that includes a lunar flyby and a record-setting journey 4,700 miles beyond the Moon.
WatchFour astronauts will fly 450,000 miles around the Moon and back starting Wednesday, ending a 54-year hiatus on crewed lunar missions. An 80 percent favorable weather forecast greeted the crew as they entered quarantine at Kennedy Space Center.
Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen are days from liftoff on a 10-day, 1.3-million-mile mission that will send the first woman and first Black astronaut beyond low Earth orbit, surpassing Apollo 13's record for the greatest distance from Earth.
With the SLS rocket on the pad at Kennedy Space Center, Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen are five days from a historic April 1 launch around the Moon.