Space Station Threshold

The lunar impactor from the Chandrayaan-1 mission today successfully made it to the surface of the moon, impacting inside the Shackleton crater on the moon's south pole. The 34 kg box-shaped MIP (Moon Impact Probe) carried three instruments, and data was successfully transmitted from the 25-minute descent of the probe after it was ejected ...

Earlier this week we had a story about old data from the Apollo missions that could potentially be lost if an "antique" computer from the 1960's can't be renovated. But now comes good news about more old data which has actually been restored and enhanced to an exceedingly high quality. Some of [...]

Discovery Channel has a blog on the missing tapes.  In reality, they were never missing.  The technology was lost to read these tapes. Holmes is hopeful of getting the tape recorder working again in January, and then he said it should only take a week to extract information that has been locked away since the early 1970s. It'll still ...

Discovery Channel has a blog on the missing tapes . In reality, they were never missing. The technology was lost to read these tapes. Holmes is hopeful of getting the tape recorder working again in January, and then he said it should only take a week...(read more)

Hey, here's a topic we haven't really gotten around to yet… the Moon. Today we look at our closest astronomical companion: the Moon. What impact does the Moon have on our lives, where did it come from, who walked on it, and are we ever going to walk on it again? We're going to learn [...]

Old, forgotten data from three Apollo moon missions could help overcome one of the biggest environmental hurdles facing future lunar colonists. Pervasive moon dust can clog equipment, scratch helmet visors –or worse, get inside astronaut lungs and cause serious health problems. But 173 data tapes hold information that could be essential in ...

Chandrayaan-1, India’s first unmanned spacecraft mission to moon, successfully entered lunar orbit on November 8. The spacecraft fired its engines to reduce velocity and enable the Moon's gravity to capture it; engines were fired for 817 seconds when Chandrayaan-1 was about 500 km away from the moon. Next up for the spacecraft will [...]

Following the fifth and final orbit raising maneuver which put Chandrayaan-1 closer to the moon, the spacecraft snapped the first picture of its final destination. This clear, crisp image of the moon bodes well for spacecraft's mission to map the entire moon's surface with its Terrain Mapping Camera. And all systems are go [...]

One astrobiologist claims the deep, dark craters on the Moon might contain traces of early life from meteorites blasted off the Earth by asteroids billions of years ago. Joop Houtkooper, from the University of Giessen in Germany says studying these craters could reveal clues about the origin and evolution of life on Earth or [...]

While the Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft wends its way to the Moon with gradually longer elliptical loops around the Earth, mission scientists decided to test out the main camera on board, the Terrain Mapping camera (TMC). The camera snapped this picture of Earth on October 29, 2008, at a distance of 70,000 km, showing Australia. [...]