“I refer to LunaNet as the big umbrella,” Gramling says. “It is an architecture that defines the standards that are going to be used for interoperable communications and position, navigation, and timing services. There’s a large effort underway to define those standards and document those in a LunaNet interoperability specification.” “It’s a very different paradigm … Read more
Thanga and his team have sketched a system that would use solar panels and batteries to provide the power to push temperatures inside a lava tube down to the deep freeze needed to create their lunar ark. This is the defining difference between Thanga’s design and Hagedorn’s thought experiment. Where Thanga’s group would aim to … Read more
Illustration: Blue Origin The White House announced earlier this year it would implement a unified time standard for the Moon by 2027, an essential measure as NASA aims to establish a permanent presence on the lunar surface. Two Colorado-based researchers proposed a solution in a recently published scientific paper involving clocks floating in space to … Read more
This story originally appeared on WIRED en Español and has been translated from Spanish. August has delivered many spectacular sights in the night sky: a supermoon, meteor showers, and supercharged auroras. Mars and Jupiter also currently appear unusually close together in the night sky, in what’s known as a conjunction. They appeared closest during the … Read more
This story originally appeared on WIRED Italia and has been translated from Italian. Their existence had been disputed for decades, but now we can finally we can say for sure: There are caves beneath the surface of the moon. This week, an international research team led by the University of Trento in Italy published a … Read more
A small West Coast company is helping astronauts return to the moon in 2026. ALUULA Composites has signed on to provide its durable, lightweight fabric to build space habitats. The Max Space inflatables can be transported in very small packages and then expanded to create a much larger workspace. “Max Space is doing the design … Read more
Astronauts may one day set up camp in caves on the moon, according to research highlighting the existence of the newly identified underground structures. An Italian research team on Monday published evidence of a moon cave that they believe is 40 metres wide and tens of metres long, if not more. Researchers discovered the cave … Read more
When the elevator is stopped, the two forces are equal and opposite, and the net force is zero. But if you’re accelerating upward, the net force must also be upward. This means the normal force exceeds the gravitational force (shown by the lengths of the two arrows above). So you feel heavier when the normal … Read more
(NewsNation) — China’s recent moon mission that retrieved rock samples from the dark side of the moon may be raising red flags over a future territorial fight in space. “China has made extraordinary strides, especially in the last 10 years, but they are very, very secretive,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson told a House panel in … Read more
In addition to raising these legal and ethical quandaries, the Apollo waste bags have also inspired exciting scientific questions. How long did those bagged microbes last on the Moon? Did exposure to such unforgiving conditions prompt any mutations or adaptations? Since all species on Earth descend from microbes, this line of research would shed new … Read more
