Moon

With the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing just two days away, NASA on Friday released the sharpest images ever taken of astronaut work sites on the moon, showing hardware and soil disturbances left behind by the 12 Americans who visited the lunar surface between 1969 and 1972. The images, taken over the last few weeks by cameras aboard the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, include some of the 10-foot-tall landing structure called the descent stage.

Nearly four decades after astronaut Neil Armstrong planted his boot on the surface of the moon, the U.S. is about to take the first small step toward colonizing Earth's tag-along satellite. On Wednesday, NASA is scheduled to launch a robotic mission aimed at finding the best site for Earth's first off-world colony, the centuries-old dream of science fiction writers and utopians.

NASA scientists announced Friday that they had picked a 60-mile-wide crater near the moon's south pole as the place where they will send a rocket to punch a hole in the lunar surface next month in search of water. Instruments aboard other satellites and on Earth have detected a significant amount of hydrogen, a telltale marker for water, on the northwest rim of the crater known as Cabeus A. "We're very confident we're going to hit a good place," Anthony Colaprete, lead scientist for the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, or LCROSS, mission, said at a briefing at Ames Research Center in Mountain View.

One of the biggest problems facing America's space agency as it prepares to return to the moon is how to manage lunar dust. It gets into everything. Worse, it's sticky, adhering to spacesuits and posing a potentially serious health hazard to future colonists. Now, a scientist who has been studying the problem off and on over four decades thinks he may have untangled the mystery of why that dust is so sticky.

The Russian and European space agencies agreed jointly to build a vehicle for six-person flights around the moon, where only the U.S. has landed. Roscosmos and the European Space Agency chose a conical rather than winged design for the planned spacecraft after six months of study, Roscosmos said this week. The vehicle is to be used in near-Earth and low-lunar orbits. Roscosmos agreed to prepare a delivery rocket for testing by 2015, with people expected to begin flying three years later.

A new analysis of volcanic glass recovered from the moon decades ago found the rocks contain traces of the constituents of water, challenging a long-held notion that the moon is perfectly dry. Using a technique that was not available when Apollo astronauts collected the minuscule rocks in the early 1970s, scientists were able to detect telltale signs of water trapped inside the pebble-like glass.

A Chinese appeals court has upheld a ban against a company trying to sell land on the moon, ruling that "celestial bodies" could not be anyone's property, state media said Saturday. Lunar Embassy to China, a Beijing-based company that sold plots of lunar land to individuals, sued the Beijing Administration of Industry and Commerce, which revoked its business license and fined it $6,500 in October 2005. Haidian District People's Court ruled against the company in November 2005.

Japan's space agency announced Thursday that it plans to send its first probe around the moon in August. The $269-million Selene, or Selenological and Engineering Explorer, will be carried into space by a Japanese-built H-2A rocket, the agency said. During its one-year mission, the probe is to release two small satellites to measure the moon's magnetic and gravitational fields. Selene will be launched from the remote southern island of Tanegashima.

South Korea will launch its first lunar probe in 2020, joining an intensifying Asian space race after recent missions to the moon by China and Japan, the government said Tuesday. The plan is part of the government's Space Development Road Map, which also aims to put a satellite into lunar orbit within a decade, the Science and Technology Ministry said.

Behind 18 inches of concrete in stainless steel cabinets flushed with pure nitrogen rests a material rarer than gold, more valuable than diamonds. Not even NASA curator Gary Lofgren knows both combinations to the Johnson Space Center's vault that contains 600 pounds of lunar rocks and soil. Of late, Lofgren has noticed something unusual -- there's been a run on moon dirt. Gram by precious gram, he's been doling out samples to researchers around the world eager to study the desolate orb again.