Pre-launch photo and renders of the SPADEX satellites. ISRO designed the satellites such that either could act as the chaser and the other as target for docking. Images: ISRO Illustration of the ...

For most of the 20th century, scientists thought the Moon’s surface was bone-dry. The 382 kilograms of rock and soil samples brought by the Apollo missions to Earth attested to this. When they did ...

The Chandrayaan 3 spacecraft stack is seen here mounted in an acoustic chamber. The stack comprises the lander and an orbiter for co-flight until lunar orbit. Credit: ISRO The 1752-kilogram ...

NASA launched the MAVEN mission to Mars in 2013, around the same time as India’s popular Mangalyaan spacecraft, and entered martian orbit the year after. In the six years since, MAVEN has been ...

India has formally approved the joint ISRO-JAXA Chandrayaan 5 (LUPEX) mission to study water ice on the Moon’s south pole. The mission and its approval are notable in many ways as we’ll see below.

Scientists have long suspected water might exist on the Moon, but exactly how much there was and where it was located has been the source of much debate. In a 1967 paper, scientist Harold Urey mocked ...

The farside also lacked the Moon’s familiar dark splotches. Formed as a result of active volcanism over 3 billion years ago, it was anyone’s guess why dark lava plains cover about 31% of the nearside ...

Where did our Moon come from? The origin of our cosmic neighbor is a fundamental question in planetary science. From Galileo’s first telescopic observations of the Moon to humans walking on its ...

The Sun rises in the east and sets in the west, except if you are on Venus. That’s because it rotates on its axis in the opposite direction from other planets, and nobody knows why. This is just one ...

Cassini spacecraft’s views of huge water plumes erupting from Enceladus’ south pole. Credit: NASA JPL When Cassini flew through Enceladus’ plumes between 2008 to 2015, its mass spectrometer found a ...

Seen here is the spectacular Copernicus crater with its central peaks. They allow a peak (pun intended) into the lunar interior. Copernicus crater on the Moon with two central peaks. Credit: NASA ...

The Moon is host to a type of bright feature quite glaringly called swirls. Here is the lunar swirl of Reiner Gamma. Beautiful and bright lunar swirl of Reiner Gamma. It spans well over a hundred ...