Word: lunar
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...initiative, for now at least, is more about what NASA plans to cancel than what it plans to pursue. The six-year-old Constellation program, which had been focused on developing new boosters, Apollo-like orbiters and a 21st century lunar lander, all with the goal of making long-term stays on the moon possible, will be scrapped, after $9 billion and a single flight of the Ares 1 booster last October. The longer-term goal of venturing out to Mars is being tabled along with it. (See pictures of the Ares rocket...
...only God and Mohammed as his prophet; fasting during Ramadan; charitable giving and ritual prayer) by which every practicing Muslim must abide. This year, the Hajj starts Nov. 25; it takes place annually between the 8th and 12th days of Dhu-al-Hijjah, the final month of the lunar Islamic calendar, a time when God's spirit is believed to be closest to earth. (See photos from the Hajj...
...discovery was worth the wait. Analysis of the water ice may give scientists an eons-long look at environmental history: any ice lurking in the shadows of lunar craters would have been there for a long, long time - billions of years, even. On Earth, for example, scientists get their best information about the planet's climatic history from ancient air trapped in polar ice, says Greg Delory of the Space Sciences Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley. Similarly, the lunar poles are record keepers of conditions over long periods. They are the dusty attic of the solar system, says...
...come from comet impacts, which would date it back to the earliest days of our solar system; that ice would hold a record of the cosmic chemistry of those formative times. But the ice could have also been formed by particles streaming from the sun, which gradually combined with lunar minerals to form water, then ice. Or it might have come from Earth, perhaps in the gigantic collision that created the moon in the first place. Whatever its origins, says Delory, the prospect of studying it is really exciting...
LCROSS scientists still have to figure out how thinly the water ice is spread in the lunar rock and soil and how deeply it's buried. That analysis is pending, and so is the full report on all the other material that was blasted into the air on impact. Stay tuned, says NASA's Wargo. There are plenty of updates to come...