NASA has released a new dataset from the Artemis II mission, including photographs, drawings, annotations and verbal observations recorded by the four astronauts as they orbited the Moon. Notably, the crew reported seeing five extremely faint flashes of light while on the Moon's far side, later confirmed by scientists as impacts from small rocky fragments striking the lunar surface. The crew also documented varied surface colors, from grays and browns to green and blue hues.
science.slashdot.org
· 2026-10-11
NASA has published nearly a terabyte of scientific data from the Artemis II mission, including 11,000 full-resolution images and videos, 8.5 hours of recorded astronaut observations, handwritten notes, transcripts, and Orion capsule camera footage. The agency also issued three accompanying reports detailing lunar science findings and operations from the mission, and made the archive accessible through its Planetary Data System.
wired.com
· 2026-10-09
Patriots quarterback Drake Maye said in a Monday media appearance that he was skeptical the US actually landed on the Moon, citing a conspiracy-theory class he took at UNC. NASA administrator Jared Isaacman responded on social media, saying he has 'the receipts' proving the landings happened.
futurism.com
· 2026-10-08
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.
nature.com
· 2026-10-07
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.
cnet.com
· 2026-10-04
New research finds that slow earthquakes, subtle fault movements that can precede larger seismic events, are often triggered when gravitational pulls from the sun and moon align with fault stress. Researchers describe the tidal effect as similar in force to a light hand push, but say its timing can be enough to nudge a fault into slipping.
gizmodo.com
· 2026-09-30
SpaceX's 14th Starship test flight reached orbit for the first time on Monday, deploying 26 functioning Starlink satellites and completing a controlled splashdown of its Super Heavy booster. However, engine failures—one on the booster during ascent and descent, and one on the upper stage during ascent—forced SpaceX to cut the planned 10-hour, six-orbit mission short, returning the ship to Earth after about three hours before it exploded on Pacific splashdown.
futurism.com
· 2026-09-29
Researchers built a laboratory model replicating conditions in the subsurface ocean of Saturn's moon Enceladus to test how microscopic organisms might fare there. The simulation examined whether microbial life could endure the moon's icy, salty environment.
gizmodo.com
· 2026-09-28
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.
notes.secretsauce.net
· 2026-09-27
A new study in The Astrophysical Journal argues Venus once had a natural moon that gradually spiraled inward and collided with the planet, explaining why Venus is moonless today. Lead author Stephen Kane, an astrophysicist at UC Riverside, says the moon's demise didn't require a violent impact event, but resulted from the interplay between Venus's gravity and its slow rotation rate.
futurism.com
· 2026-09-27
Researchers at the University of California, Riverside modeled how Venus' extremely slow rotation—243 Earth days per spin—combined with its gravity could have gradually dragged a hypothetical moon inward until it broke apart and was absorbed by the planet. Lead author Steven Kane says this process wouldn't have required a catastrophic collision, contradicting an earlier theory that Venus' moon was destroyed by an impact with another body. The team built a computer simulation of gravitational interactions to test this mechanism.
wired.com
· 2026-09-24
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.
gizmodo.com
· 2026-09-23
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