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NASA has made publicly available a comprehensive collection of lunar images and data gathered during the Artemis II crewed flight. The information was collected by the four astronauts aboard the spacecraft and is expected to aid future lunar surface missions.
Blue Origin has revealed a concept called the Power Tower, a 20-meter solar array designed to deploy vertically after landing on the Moon and generate more than 10 kilowatts of electricity. The company says the system targets Moon Base operations near the lunar south pole, the region NASA's Artemis program is focused on, though no flight date has been announced. An animation shows the tower's mast rising and arms unfolding to position solar panels after landing.
Georgetown space law professor Steve Mirmina argues in a new paper, published Sept. 19 in Air and Space Law, that no US agency has legal authority to regulate what companies send to the lunar surface. He cites examples including Celestis's $3,495 pet-ashes memorials, a beverage company's drink-shaped payload, Jeff Koons's 125 mini-sculptures tied to NFTs, and a crowdfunded cross, noting humans have left roughly 500,000 pounds of material on the moon.
A programmer created a visualization tool to explain why the moon's illuminated side can appear to point upward after sunset, contrary to the naive expectation that it should point down toward the sun. Using the program, they found that when the moon is high in the sky rather than at the horizon, an observer looks at it from below, causing the dark portion to appear as a slice missing from the bottom rather than the whole underside. The effect is most visible with a nearly full moon and produces no visible paradox with a half-moon.
NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said China's Chang'e 7 lunar mission, delayed last month until early 2026, was headed for the Shackleton Crater—the same South Pole target NASA has prioritized for its own exploration. China gave no detailed reason for the postponement, but Isaacman called the delay fortunate for the US, noting the mission includes rovers and hopper drones capable of extensive mobility around the crater's ice-rich, permanently shadowed regions.
Scientists analyzing a rock retrieved from the Moon's far side say it shows signs consistent with an ancient magnetic field, according to researchers studying the sample. The finding feeds into a long-running scientific debate over whether the Moon once generated its own magnetism before losing it.
NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said the agency will be selective about which countries it partners with in lunar exploration, prioritizing only what he called 'good deals.' Speaking at a defense conference near Washington, he framed the race to the Moon's south pole as a contest for limited prime real estate rich in water ice and near-constant sunlight, rather than a purely symbolic contest.
NASA and IBM Research have jointly released the NASA-IBM Lunar Foundation Model, an open-source AI system pretrained on SomBench, a dataset of nearly two million co-registered lunar data bundles across 11 modalities. The model fuses imagery, topography, mineralogy, radar, gravity and other planetary datasets to help scientists analyze the Moon's surface, with USRA scientist Rachel Slank contributing planetary science expertise during development.
NASA scientist Robert Wagner spotted a fresh lunar crater by comparing images from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter's wide-angle camera taken in October 2025, tracing the impact to sometime between April 11 and May 22, 2024. The crater, since named McGetchin after scientist Tom McGetchin, measures 728 feet wide and 141 feet deep, and scientists estimate an impact of this size occurs roughly once every 132 years.
NASA scientist Robert Wagner discovered a massive new lunar crater while performing a routine data check on imagery from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. The impact, likely caused by an object roughly the size of a six-story building sometime between April and May 2024, created a crater 728 feet wide and 141 feet deep, the largest fresh impact site the orbiter has ever recorded.
NASA-affiliated scientists have documented the largest newly formed crater on the Moon, resulting from an impact recorded in 2024. The impact site is unusual because it produced a cold spot stretching more than four miles across, a thermal signature researchers describe as extremely rare.
A new analysis suggests that future lunar settlements could tap abundant sunlight to generate massive amounts of solar electricity, potentially enough to support large populations. However, researchers warn that water, largely locked as ice in permanently shadowed lunar craters, may not be sufficient to sustain such large-scale habitation.