Moon Monday
Moon Monday #206: The state of global lunar exploration in 2024
Plus, my experience at the Galaxy Forum in Wenchang, China to that end.
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Visual Space
Let’s explore our Moon’s mountains! 🌖
The Moon is home to some amazing mountains. Unlike the millions of years it takes for most mountains on Earth to form via slowly colliding tectonic plates, most lunar mountains form near-instantly through asteroid or cometary impacts. Here are some resources to explore them. 🗻 1. With cool elevation graphs and
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Reading menu: Weird cosmic worlds
A neutron star is like a huge atomic nucleus held together by gravity rather than the strong nuclear force. But we don’t fully understand how neutrons interact at extreme temperatures and densities. It’s possible that within a neutron star the neutrons break down into a soup of quarks,
Space for fun
Fun with serious SLS rocket headlines
I've been having some fun writing eerily reflective headlines on my Moon Monday newsletter about the clumsy progress of NASA’s SLS rocket that cost $23 billion. * NASA’s Moon rocket crawls to the launchpad * NASA’s Moon rocket just won’t move fast enough * The SLS rocket’
Articles
My articles on Indian space
Here are all notable articles and blog posts I’ve published on India’s largely successful—but also very opaque—space program, including all of its planetary missions. I keep updating any evergreen posts within this list, and will maintain the list itself for the convenience of readers, so make
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The Moon link list
A quick reference page with links to frequently referred to topics on Moon Monday.
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How NASA defines “Special Regions” for Mars missions
Here’s something interesting I came across last year while writing the article “How NASA decides where to land on Mars”. NASA had some restrictions in place for selecting the region its Perseverance rover will land on and explore. From its landing site selection page: The Mars 2020 Science Definition
Chandrayaan
On ISRO’s Chandrayaan 2 orbiter data release
The initial dataset is underwhelming and there is no sign of when ISRO will release the next set.
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Some Neptune tidbits
Here are some more interesting bits I came across when I wrote an article on Neptune. * The European Space Agency is investigating two ways to explore the ice giants. One is a Uranus orbiter, which will be solar-powered, and not nuclear—a bold move. And the other is contributing to
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Extra tidbits on Japan’s MMX mission
Here are some more interesting bits I didn’t get to cover in my article on Japan's MMX mission, which will collect samples from Mars’ moon Phobos. * Slowing down from orbital speeds to a touch down under Phobos’ weak gravity is going to be incredibly challenging. Among other
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Reading menu: The Apollo Moon landings
In what is considered to be the biggest technological leap of all time, NASA successfully landed twelve astronauts on the Moon between 1969 to 1972. Naturally, there is a lot of Apollo content on the web, including an extensive set of NASA documents. Since all of it can get pretty
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Reading menu: Apollo landing sites (and candidates) and their geology
Here is a curated collection of my articles and blog posts on several Apollo landing sites, site candidates, and their geology. Places on the Moon explored by Apollo astronauts and what we learnt from them Apollo 11 landing site – The Sea of Tranquility Then there's the Apollo 15