Category: Moon

Moon

November 10, 2009

An update about the LCROSS mission

Last June, I mentioned the LCROSS mission which was aimed at impacting the surface of the Moon. 113 days after its journey, this event indeed happened on October 9 2009. At 04:31 UT the Centaur upper stage rocket  hit the surface, ...

July 20, 2009

We really walked on the Moon…

Hello, We all heard about this conspiration rumors which claimed that the Apollo missions were never a success and nobody ever walked on the Moon. Just be reassured, I am not going to advertise this crazy theory :-) It is based ...

July 16, 2009

Beginning of the Apollo 11 's Commemoration

Hello, Forty years ago, the fifth human space flight called Apollo 11 was launched using a Saturn V from the Kennedy Space Center with three astronauts on board. Two of them (Neil Amstrong & Edwin 'Buzz' Aldrin) became the first humans ...

July 1, 2009

Uranium on the moon. Mining the moon?

Hello, I will briefly report today that Uranium, a very famous radioactive element was found on the surface of the moon thanks to the gamma-ray spectrometer on board the Japanese mission called Kayuga. I already described extensively the Kayuga mission,officially named SELENE ...

June 23, 2009

The end of Kayuga in HD!

A brief update about my previous post into which I described the demise of the Kayuga mission. The crash on the lunar surface was indeed recorded by the High Definition TV and can be seen on the JAXA channel in ...

June 19, 2009

Two new missions toward the moon in one rocket

Dear readers, Yesterday June 18 2009 at 21:17 GMT (2:17 PDT) an Atlas V rocket lifted off carrying two missions designed by NASA and dedicated to the exploration of the moon, our closest space neighbor. if you have read my previous posts ...

June 12, 2009

The demise of a mission – Kayuga crashed on the Moon

Hello, I am back from AAS in Pasadena, CA where I gave a talk on the use of Adaptive Optics to study Multiple Asteroid Systems. This is my last professional trip for the summer since I just hired 2 students to ...