Blue Origin announced that it will send an “ultra-low” polar orbiter called Oasis-1 to the Moon to “create the most detailed high-resolution maps to date of lunar water ice, Helium-3, radionuclides, ...

A lot of interesting lunar science results have been published this year. Here’s a non-exhaustive but curated set of papers with a brief takeaway from each along with a representative graph or ...

I’m thrilled to welcome Astrolab as a continuing yearly sponsor of my Moon Monday blog+newsletter! California-based Venturi Astrolab Inc. (Astrolab) is developing the large multi-purpose rovers of ...

Before we begin, a clarifying note about the title of the previous Moon Monday: An Amazon delivery for NASA’s VIPER rover? Well, I’ve received many emails saying how Amazon has a distinct space entity ...

A note before we start: A warm welcome to the new wave of subscribers coming from Fraser Cain’s recommendation of my blog & newsletter on his YouTube channel. It made my day—especially because I’ve ...

A space mission is an immensely complex undertaking. Hundreds to thousands of experts from several distinct fields come together to build the thousands of parts and functions of a spacecraft. To ...

This century has seen countries worldwide explore our Moon with new and varied technological capabilities. In recent years, Japan’s SLIM spacecraft achieved the world’s most precise robotic lunar ...

Here are all notable articles and blog posts I’ve published on India’s largely successful—but also very opaque—space program, including all of its planetary missions. I keep updating any evergreen ...

When Mangalyaan entered orbit around Mars, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi had boasted that at ~$70 million, the mission was cheaper than the Hollywood film Gravity, and even an auto rickshaw ...

Let’s start with the origin story of NISAR. Over a decade ago, NASA was formulating the L-band based DESDynI mission based on the US scientific community’s 2007 Decadal recommendation. ISRO’s S-band ...

The Moon is host to a type of bright feature quite glaringly called swirls. Here is the lunar swirl of Reiner Gamma. Beautiful and bright lunar swirl of Reiner Gamma. It spans well over a hundred ...

India has formally approved the joint ISRO-JAXA Chandrayaan 5 (LUPEX) mission to study water ice on the Moon’s south pole. The mission and its approval are notable in many ways as we’ll see below.