moon

Defense and aerospace company Northrop Grumman will work alongside some of its partners to develop a Lunar Terrain Vehicle (LTV) for NASA, the company has announced. The rover will be used to shuttle NASA's astronauts across the Moon's surface as part of a future crewed Artemis mission. Multiple other companies will fulfill their own parts of the project, including Michelin, Intuitive Machines, Lunar Outpost, and AVL.

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For decades scientists have speculated that the moon potentially had solid carbon dioxide hidden in something researchers called lunar carbon dioxide cold traps. Finally, after decades of speculation, the presence of those carbon dioxide cold traps on the moon have now been confirmed. This is an important discovery that could be a significant influence in future lunar missions and can potentially impact sustained missions on the moon.

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Researchers from the University of Arizona published a new study suggesting a near-Earth asteroid called Kamo`oalewa might be a moon fragment. The asteroid is a quasi-satellite, which is a group of near-Earth asteroids that orbit the sun close to Earth. Researchers know very little about this class of objects overall because they are very faint and hard to observe.

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NASA has been pushing hard to build a new spacecraft and plan missions that will put humans on the moon's surface again for the first time since the Apollo era. This week, NASA provided the first major Artemis mission update since President Biden took office. In the update, NASA talked about challenges and progress made for the mission and reiterated the commitment to exploring the moon and sending astronauts to Mars in the long term.

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NASA is working on a mission that will launch late in 2022 called the Polar Resources Ice-Mining Experiment, or PRIME-1. The goal of the mission is to send an ice-mining experiment to the Moon's South Pole. NASA will land its experiment on a ridge near Shackleton crater, which is a location that has been under evaluation for months.

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NASA has announced a new contest open to students in grades K-12 in public and private schools around the country, as well as homeschooled children. The contest is called the Lunabotics Junior Contest and seeks input from students to design a robot concept to support excavation on the moon. NASA knows in the future, when travel to the moon is again common, we will need to be able to construct habitats and other structures on the moon.

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NASA is putting out a call for more astronaut shuttles, expanding the Commercial Crew program with additional missions beyond those already agreed with SpaceX and Boeing. The request for "safe, reliable, and cost-effective human space transportation services to and from the International Space Station" comes as the US space agency looks ahead to the future of the ISS and, beyond that, missions to the Moon and further afield.

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In recent years there has been renewed interest in exploring the moon's surface as preparation for potential long-term habitation of the moon, and exploration of other planets is on the horizon. China landed Chang'e-5 on the moon's surface in December 2020 and collected basaltic volcanic rocks that were returned to Earth. These were the first samples recovered from the moon since the Apollo missions ended in 1976.

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Keeping astronauts connected on the Moon might not seem like the obvious place to start when it comes to fixing WiFi back on Earth, but NASA is looking to how future space tech could help keep people connected back home. As plans for a permanent Moon base continue to develop, some of the infrastructure lessons there could fill in gaps for coverage in ill-equipped US cities.

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One of the biggest challenges for future lunar missions and a subject of intense study by NASA and other agencies is how to deal with the lunar regolith that tends to cling to everything. Lunar regolith can create problems for rocket engines and other critical systems used on the moon's surface. A company called Masten Space Systems has developed a system that they call FAST or in-Flight Alumina Spray Technique.

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Multiple space agencies plan to establish a long-term human presence on the Moon, but this process will require new solutions to old problems, such as how to get enough water to sustain astronauts and their operations. According to new research, "cooking" lunar soil may play an important role in supporting Moon bases going forward, at least when it comes to oxygen and water.

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New high-resolution image of the moon focusing on the Tycho Crater has been released. It was made using the National Science Foundations Green Bank Observatory and the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. The image of Tycho Crater has a resolution close to five meters by five meters and is comprised of about 1.4 billion pixels.

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