The Moon’s far side is overturning a long-held theory, revealing that the early Solar System’s asteroid assault may have faded slowly instead of exploding in one catastrophic burst. For decades, scientists have debated whether the early Solar System endured one sudden, catastrophic wave of asteroid strikes or a much longer period of gradually fading violence. [...]A Jupiter-mass object orbiting a brown dwarf could become the first confirmed moon beyond our Solar System. A massive object appears to be circling a brown dwarf in the CD-35 2722 system, but calling it a moon is not straightforward. Unlike moons in our Solar System, it does not orbit a planet. Instead, it travels [...]
Explorer for Artemis Geology, Lunar, and Earth — a NASA satellite program to study surface biology and geology on Earth, with technologies that could support future missions to the Moon and Mars.
NASA’s EAGLE program — Explorer for Artemis Geology, Lunar, and Earth — will be a series of satellite missions studying surface properties using technologies for Earth observation that will also benefit future missions to the Moon and Mars, where they could identify critical resources and safe landing sites.
The satellites making up the first two EAGLE missions will study biology and geology on Earth’s surface to support agriculture, disaster response, and other needs. Each mission will carry a different instrument with capabilities that complement each other. The first mission (EAGLE-VSWIR) is scheduled to take flight in 2028.
Mission Type
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EAGLE-VSWIR (Visible to Shortwave Infrared) will observe the Earth’s surface every 16 days with a high-resolution imaging spectrometer, which measures light reflected from the planet’s surface, separating wavelengths across the visual and into the infrared spectrum. The patterns created by light being reflected or absorbed across this spectral range act like fingerprints, letting scientists identify the composition of the surface.
A similar instrument, NASA’s EMIT (Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation), has been monitoring Earth from the International Space Station since July 2022, characterizing the surface mineral composition of Earth’s arid lands, monitoring ecosystem status, and tracking health and safety hazards — such as methane leaks and acid mine drainage — among other applications.
EAGLE-VSWIR will have 25 times more capability than EMIT has today. This technological leap will allow scientists to map surface deposits of critical and rare-earth minerals, strengthen food security, and aid wildfire prevention and recovery. It can also highlight environmental hazards such as oil spills or landslide risks, and monitor water quality and availability.
The EAGLE-TIR mission will provide Thermal InfraRed (TIR) imagery when it launches two to three years after EAGLE-VSWIR, measuring energy emitted from the surface and producing data that scientists can use to map temperature, composition, and critical mineral deposits. On Earth that would let researchers monitor wildfires and volcanic activity, track drought and water use by crops, study urban heat islands, observe the rates that snow or ice accumulates or melts, and better understand Earth’s resilient ecosystems.
EAGLE-TIR follows on from ECOSTRESS (ECOsystem Spaceborne Thermal Radiometer Experiment on Space Station), which has been observing Earth from the International Space Station since 2018. ECOSTRESS was designed to study how different ecosystems respond to drought and water stress, and the data has provided a vital understanding of how plants’ water use changes throughout the day. Since ECOSTRESS also measures emitted energy in the thermal infrared, its surface-temperature products have also been used for urban planning and wildfire monitoring.
Further innovation and lessons learned from ECOSTRESS has led to EAGLE-TIR, which will carry a multi-band thermal radiometer. EAGLE-TIR’s great strength compared to existing missions is that it provides detailed imagery of the entire globe every two days, day and night, at multiple wavelengths not available from other instruments.
By advancing vital techniques for measuring our planet’s surface composition, resources, and hazards, the EAGLE program addresses critical needs in Earth observation, with technologies that can also transfer to planetary exploration, where they’ll serve as pathfinders for future missions to the Moon and Mars.
NASA unveiled the EAGLE program as one part of its “Ignition” event on March 24, 2026, when it announced a wide-ranging series of transformative agencywide initiatives. With EAGLE (the Explorer for Artemis Geology, Lunar, and Earth missions), NASA will deploy breakthrough hyperspectral images across Earth with later missions anticipated for the Moon and Mars in rapid succession. On Earth they’ll identify critical minerals for national security, enable precision agriculture, and support disaster response. On Earth and at Mars they will locate critical minerals and resources such as ice for propellants, rare-earth elements for technology, and construction materials for habitats.
EMIT (Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation) measures the mineral composition of Earth’s dust source regions, to help scientists understand how they heat or cool our planet.
Learn More About EMITECOSTRESS (ECOsystem Spaceborne Thermal Radiometer Experiment on Space Station) is accurately measuring the temperature of plants on Earth.
Learn More About ECOSTRESSYour home. Our Mission. And the one planet that NASA studies more than any other.
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The post EAGLE appeared first on NASA Science.
On Aug. 5, Earth's moon is due for a human-made, high-speed impact from an identified flying object: a spent SpaceX Falcon 9 upper stage. The event will lead to a literal "dust up" on the lunar landscape.
That Falcon 9 upper stage is a leftover from the launch that sent Firefly's Blue Ghost-1 lander to the moon on Jan. 15, 2025. Onboard the same flight was the Hakuto-R Mission 2, called Resilience, a robotic lunar lander developed by the Japanese company ispace.
And according to a new study by an international team published on the open-source arXiv server, the resulting impact plume may briefly be bright enough to see against the dark sky near the moon's edge. That means it might be visible to moongazers with sufficiently sensitive telescopes.
This head-on collision of the errant stage is expected to occur near the Einstein and Bell craters near the western lunar limb. It may well be visible to ground and space-based assets. Indeed, putting aside all the unknowns and modeling uncertainties, some specialists suggest if you've got the time and observational prowess, it might be worth a look.
Using special physics simulations to model the impact, William Jo, a graduate research assistant at the University of Texas, Austin and colleagues predict the debris plume from the impact will have the central ejecta spike reaching roughly 47 miles to over 60 miles (75 kilometers to 100 kilometers) altitude.
"Our calculations suggest the plume should be several orders of magnitude brighter than the dark-sky background for the first few minutes after impact," Jo told Space.com. "So the plume should be visible, though I'd stress this is a single nominal case. The real one will look different, and the numbers are on the optimistic side. But the point worth making is that the flash isn't really the story here."
Jo emphasized that there's great slam-dunk science to be had. "Watching this one gives us a rare chance to open up ejecta-plume science and calibrate those models against a real event, which matters for every future thing we deliver to the moon," Jo said.
According to new research led by Benjamin Fernando of the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, the impact flash and resultant ejecta plume are "potentially observable" from ground- and space-based observational facilities.
"This event provides an opportunity to attempt the recording of an artificial impact in real-time; although many of the properties of the event (such as visual magnitude) are imprecisely predicted at present," Fernando and colleagues report.
Moreover, this rocket stage meets moon occasion yields an opportunity to test a pipeline for localizing impacts on the lunar surface for future seismic experiments, investigating the dust and plume dynamics from impact events on the moon, and considering hazards from artificial space debris impacts that future astronauts on the lunar surface might have to avoid, Fernando and team members point out.
"The maximum ballistic range of resolved particles is found to be slightly under 1,000 km, which is far enough to be significant from the perspective of presenting a hazard to future astronauts or infrastructure across much of the lunar surface," Fernando et al wrote in the study.
Brent Garry is a project scientist for NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. LRO will be passing over the projected rocket stage crash site about seven days prior to the impact and about seven days after the impact, Garry explains.
"After the impact we might have a little bit more knowledge of where it is. We can do some additional targeting about a week after the impact and get some targeting over where the site is," said Garry, as noted in earlier Space.com reporting.
Meanwhile, Jo at the University of Texas, Austin underscores the fact that a spent rocket stage is a hollow, spacecraft-like body, and there are very few impact models for human-made objects like it. They seem to produce very different plumes than natural impactors, like asteroids or comets do. But Jo stresses that the real scientific contributions will come by studying the moments after the impact.
"My concern is that most observers will stop at the sub-second flash and never track down the ejecta, which is the part that should actually be visible, and where the science is."
Astronomers using ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) have discovered a gas giant around a brown dwarf in the stellar system CD-35 2722.
The post Planetary-Mass Exomoon Found Circling Brown Dwarf appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.
July’s full Buck Moon, the second full moon of summer in the Northern Hemisphere, will turn full on Wednesday (July 29). It will be the final full moon before a flurry of solar and lunar activity — notably, a total solar eclipse caused by the new moon on August 12, and a partial lunar eclipse during the following full moon on August 28.
Named for the new antlers that emerge from male deer during summer, July’s full moon is also known as the Thunder Moon and Hay Moon, according to Time and Date. The Anishinaabeg people call it Miin Giizis, or Berry Moon, according to the Center for Native American Studies.
The Buck Moon will be at its fullest at 10:37 a.m. EDT on Wednesday — however, it will also look bright and full on Tuesday and Thursday night. From North America, the best time to see it will be at moonrise in the southeast during dusk on Wednesday evening. The exact time of moonrise will depend on your location. A full moon looks most dramatic as it first appears above the eastern horizon shortly after sunset, with Rayleigh scattering making it loom orange — the same light-scattering phenomenon that makes the sky blue and sunsets red.
July's full moon is one of the lowest full moons of the year as seen from the Northern Hemisphere because it occurs relatively soon after the June solstice. A full moon always sits opposite the sun, so the path of July's full moon mirrors the sun's path in February.
You can easily enjoy the full moon with the naked eye, but a good backyard telescope or pair of stargazing binoculars can help you zoom in on famous structures, such as craters and Apollo landing sites. And if you want to take stunning photos of the moon, here’s everything you need to know.
Two weeks after theBuck Moon, the new moon will slide directly between Earth and the sun, causing a total solar eclipse. Observers along a narrow path of totality in eastern Greenland, western Iceland and northern Spain will see the moon block the sun for a few minutes, revealing the solar corona.
A deep partial solar eclipse will be visible across Europe, with a small partial solar eclipse observed over Canada and the northeastern U.S.. The largest eclipse in Canada will be 93% in northeastern Nunavut, while northeastern Maine in the U.S. will see 29% of the sun covered by the moon. Solar eclipse glasses must be worn at all times to safely view the partial phases.
The next full moon, the Sturgeon Moon, will rise on August 27 and be partially eclipsed by Earth overnight. More than 96% of the moon will pass into Earth's shadow as seen from Europe, Africa, North America and South America.
How much do you know about the moon? Test your lunar smarts with our moon quiz!
On July 3, one of NASA’s two Mars-destined ESCAPADE (Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers) spacecraft captured photos of Earth and the Moon in visible and thermal infrared light. At the time, the spacecraft was 363,250 miles (584,600 kilometers) from Earth and 115,600 miles (186,100 kilometers) from the Moon, making the Moon appear relatively large.
Taken with the Sun only partly illuminating Earth and the Moon, the visible light image shows the two bodies as crescents, with only around 8% of each face sunlit. Yet in the thermal infrared image, the shadowed hemisphere of Earth is illuminated by its own heat from both the atmosphere and surface, glowing at minus 10 to minus 44 degrees Fahrenheit (250 to 280 kelvins). Without the insulating blankets of oceans and atmospheres, the Moon’s far side remains at a much cooler minus 280 degrees Fahrenheit (100 kelvins).
July 3, 2026
The ESCAPADE mission used its Visible and Infrared Observation System cameras, provided by Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, to capture the images, which are more than just road trip photo album snaps.
“We are thrilled that ESCAPADE was able to accommodate these excellent space-qualified cameras which will search for visible Martian aurora and investigate thermal properties of the Martian surface and atmosphere,” said Rob Lillis, the mission’s principal investigator at the University of California, Berkeley. “Since Earth and the Moon are well-known targets, imaging them provides an important calibration check for ESCAPADE’s cameras.”
The ESCAPADE spacecraft, which were built by Rocket Lab, are currently in a “loiter” orbit around Lagrange point 2, a location in space about a million miles from Earth. In November 2026, the spacecraft will fly by Earth to use the planet’s gravity to slingshot their way to Mars. When the spacecraft arrive in September 2027, they will study how a million-mile-per-hour stream of material flowing from the Sun, known as solar wind, interacts with the Martian environment and how that drives atmospheric loss at the Red Planet.
The ESCAPADE mission is funded by NASA’s Heliophysics Division and is part of the NASA Small Innovative Missions for Planetary Exploration program. The UC Berkeley’s Space Sciences Laboratory leads the mission with key partners Rocket Lab; NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland; Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University; Advanced Space; and Blue Origin.
By Mara Johnson-Groh
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
The post NASA’s ESCAPADE Snaps Family Portrait of Earth, Moon appeared first on NASA Science.
On July 3, one of NASA’s two Mars-destined ESCAPADE (Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers) spacecraft captured photos of Earth and the Moon in visible and thermal infrared light. At the time, the spacecraft was 363,250 miles (584,600 kilometers) from Earth and 115,600 miles (186,100 kilometers) from the Moon, making the Moon appear relatively large.
Taken with the Sun only partly illuminating Earth and the Moon, the visible light image shows the two bodies as crescents, with only around 8% of each face sunlit. Yet in the thermal infrared image, the shadowed hemisphere of Earth is illuminated by its own heat from both the atmosphere and surface, glowing at minus 10 to minus 44 degrees Fahrenheit (250 to 280 kelvins). Without the insulating blankets of oceans and atmospheres, the Moon’s far side remains at a much cooler minus 280 degrees Fahrenheit (100 kelvins).
July 3, 2026
The ESCAPADE mission used its Visible and Infrared Observation System cameras, provided by Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, to capture the images, which are more than just road trip photo album snaps.
“We are thrilled that ESCAPADE was able to accommodate these excellent space-qualified cameras which will search for visible Martian aurora and investigate thermal properties of the Martian surface and atmosphere,” said Rob Lillis, the mission’s principal investigator at the University of California, Berkeley. “Since Earth and the Moon are well-known targets, imaging them provides an important calibration check for ESCAPADE’s cameras.”
The ESCAPADE spacecraft, which were built by Rocket Lab, are currently in a “loiter” orbit around Lagrange point 2, a location in space about a million miles from Earth. In November 2026, the spacecraft will fly by Earth to use the planet’s gravity to slingshot their way to Mars. When the spacecraft arrive in September 2027, they will study how a million-mile-per-hour stream of material flowing from the Sun, known as solar wind, interacts with the Martian environment and how that drives atmospheric loss at the Red Planet.
The ESCAPADE mission is funded by NASA’s Heliophysics Division and is part of the NASA Small Innovative Missions for Planetary Exploration program. The UC Berkeley’s Space Sciences Laboratory leads the mission with key partners Rocket Lab; NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland; Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University; Advanced Space; and Blue Origin.
By Mara Johnson-Groh
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
Scientists working at the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT) in Chile have detected evidence for an unusual, ‘moon-like object’ in the CD-35 2722 system that doesn’t appear to orbit a planet.
The research team behind the discovery said the unusual object, which orbits a brown dwarf that orbits a large, Sun-like star, doesn’t fit normal astronomical categories, leaving them unsure what to name it.
If confirmed, the unusual space object would be the first moon without a host planet ever discovered. Such a confirmation would also make the newly termed “exosatellite” the first exomoon of any type discovered outside our Solar System.
According to a statement announcing the moon-like object, ESO student Kevin Hoy had been monitoring the CD-35 2722 star system for months. The measurements that spotted the new, moon-like object were taken with the observatory’s CRIRES+ instrument using the radial velocity method that spotted the first planet around a Sun-like star.
During that time, the researcher and lead author of a study detailing the find said he noticed the system was “super weird” compared to our local Solar System. While the star at the center of the system, with a mass of about half of our Sun, was not unusual, they also determined that it is orbited by a brown dwarf. Brown dwarfs are astronomical objects too small to be a star, but too massive to be a planet, making the pairing unusual. Still, it was not unheard of.
However, according to Hoy, when the team spotted a third, smaller object in the system, they were left confused. Measurements indicated it is at least as massive as Jupiter, suggesting it may be a moon orbiting the Brown Dwarf, only without a host planet.
“The satellite we report is a giant gaseous body orbiting a highly massive companion, itself several times the mass of Jupiter,” explained Alice Zurlo, Director of the Millennium Nucleus of Young Exoplanets and their Moons (YEMS) in Chile project and collaborator on the study.
The team has temporarily named the moon-like object an “exosatellite.” However, Hoy said the object’s status as a ‘third wheel’ in the system makes them want to classify it as a moon, “even if it is nothing like the small, rocky moons we have in our system.”
“This system is somewhat hard to define using Solar-System-based words like ‘planet’ and ‘moon’,” the researcher explained. “The exosatellite is clearly massive enough to be a planet, but it does not orbit a star, though it orbits an object that orbits a star.”
Director Zurlo said the differences between the observed system and our own Solar System have added to the difficulty in labeling the moon-like object.
“We have a clear delineation between the planets and the Sun in the Solar System, so defining things like moons is simple,” Zurlo explained. “In the CD-35 2722 system, where we are blurring the lines between stars, planets, and moons, the whole thing becomes more complicated to describe.”
When discussing the significance of the moon-like object, Director Zurlo said detecting satellites in other systems will help researchers better understand the diversity in formation and evolution of planets, moons, and other moon-like objects. The director also noted the historical nature of the detection.
“As exotic as it is, this system is truly unique and represents a breakthrough: the first plausible detection of an exosatellite,” the researcher explained.
Moving forward, the team said the increased sensitivity of the 39-meter mirror on the ESO’s in-development Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) will allow for the detection of even smaller moons, including potentially spotting moons the size of Earth’s largest satellite. The researchers said such detections will likely force the astronomical community to reconsider how planetary objects are labeled, especially those in systems so radically different from our own.
The study “Planetary-mass exosatellite detected around the substellar companion of a star” was published in the journal Nature.
Christopher Plain is a Science Fiction and Fantasy novelist and has spent the last six years as Associate News Editor and Head Science Writer at The Debrief. Follow and connect with him on X, learn about his books at plainfiction.com, or email him at christopher@thedebrief.org.
Astronomers have found a Jupiter-mass world orbiting a brown dwarf that orbits a star.
The post Exoplanet or Exomoon? New Contender Elicits Skepticism appeared first on Sky & Telescope.
NASA is teaming up with 37 companies to develop the next generation of technologies that could make long-term exploration of the Moon and Mars possible. NASA has chosen 41 proposals from 37 U.S. companies to help develop technologies needed for a sustained human presence on the Moon and eventual crewed missions to Mars. The companies [...]NASA is taking another major step toward a permanent Moon base with four new commercial missions that will test technology, deliver science, and help prepare for humanity’s future beyond Earth. NASA has selected three commercial space companies to carry out four new lunar missions in late 2028 through the agency’s Moon Base Program. Astrobotic, Firefly [...]Landing spacecraft on the moon could contaminate ancient clues about how life may have originated on Earth, a new study finds.
As NASA continues on with its plan of sending astronauts back to the moon with the Artemis program, researchers are exploring what possible unintended consequences may arise from humans visiting the lunar surface. For instance, Artemis IV will land astronauts near the moon's south pole and the agency has future plans for building a longer-term moon base on the lunar surface, which would require many more trips. And indeed, a new study has found the exhaust from spacecraft involved with these landings could expel enough methane to contaminate the moon's surface — possibly destroying molecules that could help to explain how life may have originated on Earth.
"We are trying to protect science and our investment in space," senior study author Silvio Sinibaldi, the planetary protection officer at the European Space Agency, said in a statement. "Our activity can actually hinder scientific exploration."
While experts have had concerns for some time about how rocket launches on Earth pollute our planet and atmosphere, scientists have only really considered this issue with our own planet. This is especially because we haven't been to the moon's surface in over 50 years; concerns of accidental effects of a lunar landing simply haven't been top-of-mind. That's what makes this new study so important. It points to a potential issue that could mean that future moon landings might actually be detrimental to science.
So why do we think the signs of life could be hiding on the moon? It's actually hiding in ice. Dark craters near the moon's poles, which exist in perpetual shadow, hold ancient ice. This ice is thought to contain material from asteroids and comets that smashed into the moon billions of years ago. Trapped in lunar ice to this day, these bits of ancient collisions could include what the researchers describe as "prebiotic organic molecules," or molecules that could have preceded life on Earth.
It's thought that these molecules from asteroid and comet visitors could have sparked life on Earth, and by studying those possibly trapped on the moon, researchers could be looking at the molecules that ended up combining and creating life as we know it.
The molecular history of life on Earth is pretty much nonexistent on our own planet, as it was largely destroyed by the billions of years of changes we've experienced. But the moon has remained mostly unchanged, so these wells of ice are a uniquely-preserved sampling of pre-life molecules.
"We know we have organic molecules in the solar system — in asteroids, for example," Sinibaldi said. "But how they came to perform specific functions like they do in biological matter is a gap we need to fill."
This ice exists in a somewhat fragile ecosystem, so left alone in darkness, this ice isn't going anywhere anytime soon. But with Artemis, NASA is planning on sending crewed landers to the moon's south pole. That might pose a problem. With computer models in this new study, researchers have shown that the methane exhaust from these landers could very quickly and permanently contaminate this ancient ice, destroying the molecular evidence sealed within.
In those computer models, the researchers simulated how methane, the main organic component expelled by planned lunar landers, would spread across the moon's surface after a landing at the south pole. While the simulations included the effects of solar wind and radiation, the moon's lack of an atmosphere caused the methane to spread incredibly quickly, reaching the moon's north pole in under two lunar days.
Within one lunar week (which is roughly seven months on Earth), over half the methane was trapped at the moon's cold polar areas, with a whopping 42% of the substance trapped at the south pole compared to 12% at the north pole. This methane could collect in the same cold pockets where ice and ancient molecules have been collected for billions of years, possibly contaminating this finite, scientific evidence.
"Their trajectories are basically ballistic," lead author Francisca Paiva, a physicist at Instituto Superior Técnico in Portugal, said in the statement. "They just hop around from one point to another."
In better news, there may be a way to circumvent some of this methane disturbance. For instance, the study suggests it's possible that by choosing colder landing sites, scientists can avoid having the methane travel as quickly or as far. Additional simulations are needed to better understand how exhaust compounds travel on the moon, however, as well as the risks that this poses for scientific investigations and if there are other materials lunar trips will involve that could contaminate the environment. Above all, the new study's team emphasizes that as we push toward future lunar exploration, it is key to balance our dreams of settling the moon with preserving its priceless history.
"We have laws regulating contamination of Earth environments like Antarctica and national parks," Paiva said. "I think the moon is an environment as valuable as those."
This work was described in a study published last year in the journal the American Geophysical Union.
NASA is once again sending scientific missions to the Moon. But under the new commercial framework for getting there, researchers need to invent a new method for how to pick where to land.
NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program is a bold innovation in organizing robotic missions to the Moon. Under this model, rather than keeping the mission process entirely in-house, the agency selects the scientific mission they want to support then simply buys a ride to the lunar surface from a commercial vendor. But, how do you pick a landing site before you know exactly how you’re getting there?
The Gruithuisen domes region, the broad area the Lunar-VISE team searched for potential landing sites. Click to enlarge. [Adapted from Williams et al. 2026]
Picking a landing site is no small task: for context, selecting the landing sites for each of the most recent Mars rovers took five years and multiple community workshops. The Lunar-VISE team therefore took a streamlined and logic-driven approach. They started by explicitly laying out their science objectives: Lunar-VISE’s purpose is to investigate some strangely silicate-rich volcanic formations called the Gruithuisen domes, so they had to land either on or near those. They also had to have access to boulders that were excavated from deep within the domes during a crater formation event, so they had to pick a spot with boulders relatively nearby.
In addition to objectives, they also laid out a slew of constraints. Although they needed boulders nearby, they couldn’t have too many boulders, or any particularly large boulders, since those could pose hazards for landing. There also couldn’t be any steep slopes in the field. Most of the area had to maintain a line of sight with a supporting orbiter for communications, so they couldn’t set down near any ridges. Also, they had to consider how the terrain would cast shadows as the lunar day progressed, since they didn’t want their mission cut short by freezing temperatures and a lack of solar power. As the team quipped, “many interesting, high-science value locations on the Moon may not be in proverbial ‘parking lots.'”
An image from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter overlaid onto a terrain model of the final landing site. Click to enlarge. [Williams et al. 2026]
In addition to presenting their landing site, the researchers offered a handful of lessons to others who may someday be in the fortunate and thrilling position of needing to pick a landing spot on the Moon. For one, they urged teams to coordinate with the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter specialists as early as possible, since processing the imaging data for lander-quality maps is a specialized and intensive task. For another, they recommended that all of the software tools used be made publicly available so that future missions don’t need to duplicate their work.
As this article laid out, the Commercial Lunar Payload Services program and Lunar-VISE take us one step closer to making missions to the Moon routine — but we’re still figuring out exactly how to do that.
“Lunar-VISE Landing Site Selection and Characterization at Mons Gruithuisen Gamma,” Jean-Pierre Williams et al 2026 Planet. Sci. J. 7 161. doi:10.3847/PSJ/ae7d2c
The post Putting the Landing Site Before the Lander appeared first on AAS Nova.
China’s Tianwen 2 mission returns its close view of Earth's tiny "quasi-moon" Kamoʻoalewa.
The post Tianwen 2 Arrives at Quasi-Moon Kamoʻoalewa, Returns Images appeared first on Sky & Telescope.
The Moon appears half-illuminated in this photo captured by the Artemis II crew on flight day 6. The terminator – the difference between light and darkness – provides a stark contrast and even greater perspective of the Moon’s rocky, uneven, and otherworldly surface features. The near side, which is what we can see from Earth, appears in the dark gray regions at the top of this image.
Revisit imagery from the Artemis II mission.
Image credit: NASA
GOLDEN, Colorado — The moon is in need of good and accurate artists!
As NASA's Artemis program hits its stride, and in a few years "reboots" our moon with a human presence, there's an urgent need to guard against artistic misrepresentations of the lunar landscape, experts say.
We've all seen those alluring lunar renderings of vehicles and astronauts bounding about while setting up equipment and putting in place a moon base.
"We are telling the public the moon is easy — it is not!"
That's the matter-of-fact warning from Daniel Britt, the Pegasus Professor of Astronomy and Planetary Sciences in the Department of Physics at the University of Central Florida. He's also the director of the Center for Lunar and Asteroid Surface Science.
Britt spoke about and showcased artists' misconceptions during a "reality versus depictions of the lunar surface" talk here at a Space Resources Roundtable, held from June 2 to June 5 on the campus of the Colorado School of Mines.
"I wish I could say that engineers and managers know better, but they don't. We are training a generation of engineers to not worry about terrain. If the artists are getting it wrong, it is our fault. Let's stop fooling ourselves," Britt said.
Well versed in what the lunar surface truly offers, Britt scolded a number of arty accounts of lunar territory promulgated by both NASA and commercial space ventures. He spotlighted what's wrong with those pictures — for starters, small craters and ever-present lunar dust, along with dirty astronauts, dirty equipment and dirty habitats.
A flat, dustless moon is not the one we are sending Artemis astronauts to, said Britt. Crews will experience coarse terrain, pervasive dust, and a surface unlike anything here on Earth. These are the facts of life on the moon, he said.
The Apollo moon-landing missions learned this first hand. But those astronauts explored equatorial areas. The Artemis program is targeting the lunar south polar region, which will be tough to deal with thanks to the low angle of the sun.
"When you look into the sun, it will be blasting into your face. But at least you'll see the shadow of that crater you are about to trip into," said Britt. "But looking down-sun, you won't see diddly squat."
"There's need to stop deluding ourselves," Britt told Space.com, advocating the creation of a 1-to-10 scoring system for lunar art, with prizes for the worst and best visualizations
"What I want to do is land on the moon way safer and easier," he added, "so you need to ask yourself what's missing from these depictions. We are training the public to think this is easy."
To support his concern, Britt spotlighted both Apollo moonwalker-taken imagery and the scenery as projected by artists, be it using paint brush or artificial intelligence-guided computer work.
"The sun angle washes out the rough terrain. Almost all the pictures taken from the surface give the very false impression of a flat, gentle terrain," Britt said. "The reality is that the lunar surface is heavily cratered, rough, very dusty and covered in regolith."
Most Apollo surface images were taken "down-sun" because looking "up-sun" was hard. "This leaves a very false impression of a flat moon with gentle terrain," Britt said.
Apollo was pretty lucky, Britt said, observing that several of the six human moon landings experienced tilt problems. For instance, Apollo 14 experienced a 7-degree tilt on landing, and Apollo 15 had an 11-degree tilt on touchdown.
Apollo 11 had to dodge a boulder field. Apollo 12 and Apollo 16 landed on the edge of big craters. "Even small craters can be meters deep," said Britt, recalling problems encountered by astronauts on their descent to the moon.
"The dust went as far as I could see in any direction and completely obliterated craters and anything else … I couldn't tell what was underneath me," astronaut Pete Conrad said during an Apollo 12 debriefing. "I knew I was in a generally good area, and I was just going to have to bite the bullet and land, because I couldn't tell whether there was a crater down there or not."
Similarly, Apollo 16 commander John Young said: "I couldn't judge slope out the window worth a hoot, and that's the truth. Even down low. The ground looks flat, but I'm sure it would look flat if it had been a 6-8 degree slope, too. I don't see any way around that."
A flat, crater-free, dustless moon is a staple of imagery issued by NASA, the European Space Agency, other space agencies, and even private space firms, said Britt.
"Yes, these are artists' impressions," Britt said, "but somebody is telling the artists what to draw. I love the idea of landing and operating on a moon without dust, small craters, and rough terrain. However, we see the misconception of a flat, gentle moon everywhere."
"Commercial providers are just as bad. No dust, almost no small craters, no tipping problems. Yes, these are artists' impressions, and they are getting it wrong," said Britt. "NASA knows better. All these people should know better, but don't. Let's not fool the public. We owe them better data."
On a bleak stretch of the Colorado Desert in Southern California, a compact four-wheeled rover recently trundled about 16 miles (26 kilometers) with minimal intervention from the team of engineers trailing it. Called ERNEST (Exploration Rover for Navigating Extreme Sloped Terrain), this prototype is being used by NASA to advance both robotic autonomy and the ability to traverse challenging landscapes.
Developed at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, ERNEST is 4 feet (1.2 meters) long. Not only can it lift each of its mesh wheels to get past obstacles that would stymie Curiosity and Perseverance, NASA’s six-wheeled Mars rovers, but the prototype also has enhanced independent decision-making capabilities. These mobility and autonomy advances could be infused into future missions that will venture to previously inaccessible areas of the Red Planet or the Moon.
In the field, ERNEST served as a testbed for a potential future lunar mission requiring higher speeds and much greater mileage than can be accomplished by current rovers. This technology could be used to inform future designs for exploration efforts on the Moon and beyond.
“This testing is helping us refine the mobility hardware and autonomy software to navigate extreme distances across a wide range of terrain and lighting conditions anticipated on the Moon,” said Issa Nesnas, a principal technologist at JPL who led the recent testing as head of autonomy for a NASA mission concept for a potential future long-range lunar rover.
Nesnas’ team is using ERNEST to demonstrate it is possible to build a rover that’s twice as big as the prototype and capable of a long-distance Moon mission. During the recent campaign, ERNEST traveled at speeds up to 0.6 mph (1 kph) over 37 hours of driving, across seven days of intermittent testing. That’s an order of magnitude above the top speed Perseverance and Curiosity can navigate.
“You could do a science road trip across the Moon — or Mars — with this vehicle,” said James Keane, a JPL planetary scientist working on lunar missions.
The initial goal of the team that developed ERNEST was mechanical: to design a relatively simple, low-cost rover that advances the trusted rocker-bogie suspension system featured on every Mars rover since NASA’s Sojourner. This passive system keeps relatively constant weight on all six wheels, thanks to pivot points and struts that enable each one to adapt to the changing surface.
On ERNEST, the active suspension lets the rover manage weight distribution among its wheels. Two powered joints in front articulate a gimbal that allows the rover to drive using different gaits like squirming, wheel-walking, and obstacle-climbing. With a clutch mechanism, it can switch between active and passive suspension, which is less terrain capable but more energy efficient. With four steerable wheels, it can drive in any direction, including sideways.
“We started by postulating that we could do better in designing a planetary surface robotic mobility system,” said Hari Nayar, a JPL principal technologist leading the ERNEST team. “While the rocker-bogie system has been very successful over the past 30 years, there’s been a lot of research in that time on mobility and understanding terrain interaction.”
Before arriving at today’s version of ERNEST, the team built two earlier prototypes, each about 2 feet (0.6 meters) long, to test 11 active suspension configurations. In a trailer filled with lunar regolith simulant, they ran experiments at different slope angles over several months before landing on a final design.
Then the team scaled up, including adding a rectangular head mounted on a 4.5-foot-tall (1.4-meter-tall) mast. The hardware was completed in September 2024, but the rover still needed a human operator to joystick it, sending commands to instruct the rover on how to move over obstacles.
In order to train the rover to think on its own, the ERNEST team turned to reinforcement learning, a type of artificial intelligence where the robot learns by interacting with its environment. The Dynamics and Real-Time Simulation Laboratory at JPL developed a high-fidelity virtual testing environment that replicates the rover’s behavior. The team fed the simulator data collected by engineers who documented the response of the actual rover hardware to a variety of terrain types. On a high-performance computing cluster, the team ran many simulations at once, sometimes completing thousands of hours of tests over a single weekend.
After months of virtual training, the ERNEST team was ready to see if the rover could use its new autonomous algorithms to figure out how to drive over terrain features that would halt a passive-suspension rover. They set up an obstacle course with sand ripples, rubble piles, steps, and steep slopes in JPL’s Mars Yard, an outdoor terrain proving ground. Then they watched as the rover maneuvered the terrain on its own. Since then, ERNEST has completed many such courses.
Nayar’s team is starting a new autonomy project which involves integrating the rover’s ability to determine when and how to use its active suspension with longer-range intelligent navigation. The goal is to enable ERNEST to plan an efficient path so that it can tackle surmountable obstacles and circumnavigate hazardous ones. These capabilities could contribute to potential future rover missions encountering formidable landscapes on Mars or more rugged areas of the Moon.
Work on ERNEST began in 2022 was initially supported by JPL internal research and development funds. It is currently funded by NASA’s Mars Exploration Program and the agency’s Exploration Science Strategy and Integration Office in its Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. Caltech in Pasadena, California, manages JPL for NASA.
Media Contacts
Karen Fox / Molly Wasser
NASA Headquarters, Washington
240-285-5155 / 240-419-1732
karen.c.fox@nasa.gov / molly.l.wasser@nasa.gov
Melissa Pamer
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
626-314-4928
melissa.pamer@jpl.nasa.gov
2026-040
The post NASA Testing Advanced Capabilities for Moon, Mars Rovers appeared first on NASA Science.
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