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27 de sept. de 2017 · In 1982, we made a startling discovery. A meteorite found in Antarctica, ALHA 81005, is from the Moon! The rock is a complex regolith breccia, similar to those returned by the Apollo 16 mission in 1972. We have since found over 50 meteorites that, as determined from their unique chemical composition, come from the Moon.
9 de jul. de 2019 · But there’s another class of lunar heroes — scientists who made fundamental discoveries in the 360 years between Galileo’s first observations of the Moon in 1609 and the Apollo 11 landing in 1969. These 11 scientists set the stage for humankind’s personal encounter with the Moon. 1. Galileo Galilei.
- Overview
- Early forays into space
- Humans on the moon
- Moon curiosity builds again
- The recent—and future—status of moon exploration
In the 1950s, the Cold War sparked a race to visit Earth's moon with flybys, robots, and crewed missions. Here's what we discovered—and what's next.
For as long as humans have gazed skyward, the moon has been a focus of fascination. We could always see our cosmic partner’s mottled, cratered face by eye. Later, telescopes sharpened our views of its bumps, ridges, and relict lava seas. Finally, in the mid-20th century, humans visited Earth’s moon and saw its surface up close.
The earliest forays into lunar exploration were a product of the ongoing Cold War, when the U.S. and Soviet Union sent uncrewed spacecraft to orbit and land on the moon.
The Soviets scored an early victory in January 1959, when Luna 1, a small Soviet sphere bristling with antennas, became the first spacecraft to escape Earth’s gravity and ultimately fly within about 4,000 miles of the moon’s surface. (Read more about early spaceflight.)
Later in 1959, Luna 2 became the first spacecraft to make contact with the moon's surface when it crashed in the Mare Imbrium basin near the Aristides, Archimedes, and Autolycus craters. That same year, a third Luna mission captured the first, blurry images of the far side of the moon—where the rugged highland terrain is markedly different from the smoother basins on the side closest to Earth.
Then, the U.S. got in the game with nine NASA Ranger spacecraft that launched between 1961 and 1965, and gave scientists the first close-up views of the moon’s surface. The Ranger missions were daring one-offs, with spacecraft engineered to streak toward the moon and capture as many images as possible before crashing onto its surface. By 1965, images from all the Ranger missions, particularly Ranger 9, had revealed greater detail about the moon’s rough terrain and the potential challenges of finding a smooth landing site for humans.
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Moon 101
At the time, NASA was racing to fulfill a presidential promise: In 1961, President John F. Kennedy committed the United States to landing a person on the moon before the decade was complete. The Apollo program, by far the most expensive spaceflight endeavor in history, kicked off that year, and by the time it ended in 1972, nine missions and 24 astronauts had orbited or landed on the moon.
Perhaps the most famous of those, Apollo 11, marked the first time humans had stepped on another world.
On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong and Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin touched down in the Sea of Tranquility in the lunar lander Eagle, while astronaut Michael Collins orbited the moon in the command module Columbia. Armstrong, who pressed the first bootprints into the moon’s surface, famously said, “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” The pair stayed on the moon’s surface for 21 hours and 36 minutes before rendezvousing with Collins and heading back to Earth. (Exploring the legacy of Apollo 11 at the dawn of a new era of space travel.)
Each mission after Apollo 11 set new milestones in space travel and lunar exploration. Four months after the first humans reached the moon, Apollo 12 touched down, achieving a much more precise landing on the moon.
Apollo 13 narrowly avoided a near-disaster when on-board oxygen tanks exploded in April 1970, forcing the crew to abort a planned moon landing. All three survived.
During the third lunar landing, in January 1971, Apollo 14, commander Alan Shepard set a new record for the farthest distance traveled on the moon: 9,000 feet. He even lobbed a few golf balls into a nearby crater with a makeshift 6-iron.
It wasn’t until 1994 that the moon came back into focus for the United States, with a joint mission between NASA and the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization. The Clementine spacecraft mapped the moon's surface in wavelengths other than visible light, from ultraviolet to infrared. Hiding in the more than 1.8 million digital photos it captured were hints of ice in some of the moon’s craters.
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Does the Moon Still Hold Mysteries for Us?
We've taken photos from its surface, we've examined its elusive far side, we've spent $25 billion to travel to it—and the moon continues to hold our fascination.
In 1999, the Lunar Prospector orbited the moon, confirming Clementine’s discovery of ice at the lunar poles, a resource that could be crucial for any long-term lunar settlement. The mission's end was spectacular: Prospector slammed into the moon, intending to create a plume that could be studied for evidence of water ice but none was observed. (Ten years later, NASA’s LCROSS spacecraft repeated this experiment and found evidence for water in a shadowed region near the moon’s south pole.)
Since 2009, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has taken high-resolution maps of the lunar surface. Between 2011 and 2012, it was joined in orbit by NASA’s twin GRAIL probes—named Ebb and Flow—which mapped the moon’s gravitational field before intentionally crashing into a region near the lunar north pole.
NASA isn’t the only space agency with a surging interest in the moon. Within the last two decades, lunar exploration has gone truly international—and even commercial.
In 2007, Japan launched its first lunar orbiter, SELENE. China launched its first lunar spacecraft the same year, and India followed suit in 2008. By 2013, China became the third country to successfully land on the lunar surface, when its Chang’e-3 spacecraft deployed the Yutu rover.
More milestones—both for better and worse—were achieved in 2019. In January, another Chinese lander, Yutu-2, made history by becoming the first rover to touch down on the lunar farside. Meanwhile, India’s second lunar orbiter, Chandrayaan-2, unsuccessfully deployed a small lander, Vikram, on the lunar surface that year. (India’s space agency hopes to try again in 2021.) And in April 2019 Israel aimed for the moon with the launch of its Beresheet spacecraft. Unfortunately, even though the spacecraft achieved lunar orbit, it crashed during its attempt to land.
Unlike other spacecraft that came before it, Beresheet was built largely with private funding, heralding a new era of lunar exploration in which private companies are hoping to take the reins from governments.
NASA, for one, is partnering with commercial spaceflight companies to develop both robotic and crewed landers for lunar exploration; among those companies are SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Astrobotic. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and Blue Origin have announced the goal of establishing a lunar base near the south pole where people could work and live. SpaceX is developing a spacecraft capable of ferrying astronauts to the moon and Mars, and is also developing a plan to bring tourists to lunar orbit. (The future of spaceflight—from orbital vacations to humans on Mars.)
And not to be overshadowed by the commercial sector, NASA is planning its own ambitious return to the moon. The agency’s Artemis program, a sister to the venerable Apollo project, aims to put the first woman—and the next man—on the moon by 2024. The backbone of Artemis is NASA’s Orion space capsule, currently in development, although the agency is also partnering with private companies to achieve its goal.
Exploration of the Moon. The physical exploration of the Moon began when Luna 2, a space probe launched by the Soviet Union, made a deliberate impact on the surface of the Moon on September 14, 1959. Prior to that the only available means of exploration had been observation from Earth.
… Moon. Exploration. Moon Exploration. While the Moon has always been an object of wonder and scientific interest to humanity, lunar exploration began in earnest in the 1950s, with the United States and the USSR developing and launching robotic spacecraft. In 1959, the USSR's Luna 1 was the first spacecraft to fly by the Moon.
21 de oct. de 2020 · This new discovery contributes to NASA’s efforts to learn about the Moon in support of deep space exploration. Under NASA’s Artemis program, the agency will send the first woman and next man to the lunar surface in 2024 to prepare for our next giant leap – human exploration of Mars as early as the 2030s.
The origin of the moon: a timeline of discovery - BBC Science Focus Magazine.
