Tag: moon

The 1960s moon in high-def

Download larger version. A little over 40 years ago, to help it select potential landing sites for its Apollo lunar missions, NASA sent five unmanned spacecraft over two years to orbit the moon and photograph pretty much every inch of its surface. The images sent back were amazing, especially one of the Earth rising over …

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Photo of the Day: Lunar Eclipse. No, really, believe me!

I was feeling a bit disappointed in my best picture of the lunar eclipse tonight (this is about halfway to totality) until I saw John Scalzi’s photo. Now I’m thinking I did all right in the absence of a tripod and with a six-year-old girl tugging on my elbow and begging me to go back …

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Google’s new X-prize: land a robot rover on the moon

There’s a new X-Prize. This one is funded by Google, so you know the money is good. It’s for $30 million. And the goal? To land a robot on the moon. Specifically, to land “a privately funded robotic rover on the Moon that is capable of completing several mission objectives, including roaming the lunar surface …

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Apollo photo archive coming online!

This is exciting:Nearly 40 years after man first walked on the moon, the complete lunar photographic record from the Apollo project will be accessible to both researchers and the general public on the Internet. A new digital archive – created through a collaboration between Arizona State University and NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston – …

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Bigelow’s big plans

Bigelow Aerospace has big plans for Earth orbit–and beyond: Even as Bigelow Aerospace gears up for launching its second prototype space station into orbit, the company has set its sights on something much, much bigger: a project to assemble full-blown space villages at a work site between Earth and the moon, then drop them to …

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Back to the Moon

Popular Mechanics explains the plans. I’m really happy we’re heading back to the moon, but I found this paragraph depressing: It took pilots 50 years to progress from scarf-and-goggles barnstorming to setting down footprints on the Sea of Tranquility; it will have taken another half-century for us to return to the moon. Sigh. Oh, and …

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Robert A. Heinlein’s legacy lives on:

This NASA story, about how the Moon bears witness to the early history of the solar system, and could tell us whether “extinction events” caused by heavy bombardments from outer space really recur every 26 million years on Earth as some have hypothesized, is headlined “The Moon is a harsh witness.” Somebody there has read …

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Blue moons

Have you ever wondered why we consider “once in a blue moon” to be the epitome of rare occurrence? This is a good time to ask, because July 2004 is one of those rare months when there are two full moons: one on July 2, and a second on July 31. According to folklore, the …

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Selling the moon

Humans will return to the moon next year, more than 30 years after the last Apollo astronauts left. Unfortunately, the new lunar visitors will have a large handicap that will hinder their exploration efforts: they’ll all be dead. The humans in questions will arrive in the form of small amounts of ashes from cremated remains, …

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