http://www.moondaily.com/index.html Fri, 24 MAY 2013 11:54:36 AEST Fri, 24 MAY 2013 11:54:36 AEST en-us Saturn's moon Titan might be in for some wild weather as it heads into its spring and summer, if two new models are correct. Scientists think that as the seasons change in Titan's northern hemisphere, waves could ripple across the moon's hydrocarbon seas, and hurricanes could begin to swirl over these areas, too. The model predicting waves tries to explain data from the moon obtained so far by N]]> Fri, 24 MAY 2013 11:54:36 AEST Earth is pushing the moon away faster now than it has for most of the past 50 million years, mostly a result of tides, a U.S. researcher says. Matthew Huber of Purdue University says his models of the influence of tides on the moon's orbit help solve a longstanding mystery concerning the moon's age, NewScientists.com reported Wednesday. The moon's gravity creates a daily cycle of]]> Fri, 24 MAY 2013 11:54:36 AEST All exploration comes with both rewards and risks. Back in 2005 and 2006, when Pluto's second and third moons (Nix and Hydra) were discovered, searches by astronomers for still more moons didn't reveal any. So the accidental discovery of Pluto's fourth moon by the Hubble Space Telescope in mid-2011 (during a search for Plutonian rings) raised the possibility that the hazards in the Pluto system ]]> Fri, 24 MAY 2013 11:54:36 AEST Scientists have created the first global topographic map of Saturn's moon Titan, giving researchers a valuable tool for learning more about one of the most Earth-like and interesting worlds in the solar system. The map was just published as part of a paper in the journal Icarus. Titan is Saturn's largest moon - with a radius of about 1,600 miles (2,574 kilometers), it's bigger than planet ]]> Fri, 24 MAY 2013 11:54:36 AEST NASA astronomers monitoring the moon for signs of meteor impacts say they've identified the biggest explosion in the history of the observation program. The scientists, who have spent 8 years looking for explosions caused by meteoroids hitting the lunar surface, said Friday the impact would have been visible to the naked eye to anyone looking at the moon at the right moment. "On ]]> Fri, 24 MAY 2013 11:54:36 AEST For the past 8 years, NASA astronomers have been monitoring the Moon for signs of explosions caused by meteoroids hitting the lunar surface. "Lunar meteor showers" have turned out to be more common than anyone expected, with hundreds of detectable impacts occurring every year. They've just seen the biggest explosion in the history of the program. "On March 17, 2013, an object about t]]> Fri, 24 MAY 2013 11:54:36 AEST While Apollo 17 astronauts Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt visited Earth's moon for three days in December 1972, they drove their mission's Lunar Roving Vehicle 19.3 nautical miles (22.210 statute miles or 35.744 kilometers). That was the farthest total distance for any NASA vehicle driving on a world other than Earth until yesterday. The team operating NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opp]]> Fri, 24 MAY 2013 11:54:36 AEST Water inside the Moon's mantle came from primitive meteorites, new research finds, the same source thought to have supplied most of the water on Earth. The findings raise new questions about the process that formed the Moon. The Moon is thought to have formed from a disc of debris left when a giant object hit the Earth 4.5 billion years ago, very early in Earth's history. Scientists have l]]> Fri, 24 MAY 2013 11:54:36 AEST Water is perhaps the most important molecule in our solar system. Figuring out where it came from and how it was distributed within and among the planets can help scientists understand how planets formed and evolved. New research from a team including Carnegie's Erik Hauri demonstrates that water from the interiors of the Earth and Moon has a common origin. Their work is published online in Scie]]> Fri, 24 MAY 2013 11:54:36 AEST The water found on the moon, like that on Earth, came from small meteorites called carbonaceous chondrites in the first 100 million years or so after the solar system formed, researchers from Brown and Case Western Reserve universities and Carnegie Institution of Washington have found. Evidence discovered within samples of moon dust returned by lunar crews of Apollo 15 and 17 dispels the t]]> Fri, 24 MAY 2013 11:54:36 AEST Northrop Grumman has completed a feasibility study for a new commercial lunar lander for the Golden Spike Company (GSC). The study confirmed the viability of lander concepts for Golden Spike's human lunar expedition architecture and conceived a novel new, low-mass ascent stage concept dubbed "Pumpkin." Northrop Grumman's study for Golden Spike conducted the following tasks: + Reviewe]]> Fri, 24 MAY 2013 11:54:36 AEST French scientists successfully used a laser to find the Soviet-era Lunokhod 1 rover on the surface of the moon, 42 years after the first planetary exploration vehicle to land on another celestial body roamed the moon's surface, media reports said Monday. The scientists at the Cote d'Azur Observatory successfully bounced laser signals off a reflector that was known to be on the eight-wheele]]> Fri, 24 MAY 2013 11:54:36 AEST NASA's Cassini spacecraft has provided the first direct evidence of small meteoroids breaking into streams of rubble and crashing into Saturn's rings. These observations make Saturn's rings the only location besides Earth, the moon and Jupiter where scientists and amateur astronomers have been able to observe impacts as they occur. Studying the impact rate of meteoroids from outside the Sa]]> Fri, 24 MAY 2013 11:54:36 AEST Like many of his colleagues at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., Shyam Bhaskaran is working a lot with asteroids these days. And also like many of his colleagues, the deep space navigator devotes a great deal of time to crafting, and contemplating, computer-generated 3-D models of these intriguing nomads of the solar system. But while many of his coworkers are calculating]]> Fri, 24 MAY 2013 11:54:36 AEST By tracking a part of the surface of Saturn's moon Titan over several years, NASA's Cassini mission has found a remarkable longevity to the hydrocarbon lakes on the moon's surface. A team led by Christophe Sotin of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., fed these results into a model that suggests the supply of the hydrocarbon methane at Titan could be coming to an end soon ]]> Fri, 24 MAY 2013 11:54:36 AEST