Space Exploration

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.

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.

NASA announced plans Wednesday to embark on a mammoth 20-year project to send a spacecraft to Jupiter's ice-covered moon Europa as its next flagship mission to search for life elsewhere in the solar system. The mission, which could cost as much as $3 billion, will be managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Canada Flintridge.

His mother's maiden name was Moon. Buzz Aldrin, it seems, was destined from birth to travel to the rocky sphere more than 200,000 miles from planet Earth. Today he says of being on the moon: "I was exhilarated but guarded. . . . I knew that our every move and word were on display to the entire world, even though we were the only living creatures within a quarter of a million miles."

Forty years ago today, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were well on their way to a date with history, becoming the first men to set foot on another body in space. Events to mark the anniversary and commemorate the ever-thinning ranks of space-race veterans will include interviews with surviving Apollo astronauts and a Kennedy Center salute to the Apollo era. One highlight was the release Thursday of 15 newly digitized scenes of Armstrong taking his first steps on the moon.

The long-lived rover Spirit is stuck in the sand on Mars, and controllers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Canada Flintridge are scrambling to find a way to extricate the vehicle before it becomes entombed on the Red Planet. "This is quite serious," said JPL's John Callas, the project manager for Spirit and its twin, Opportunity. "Spirit is in a very difficult situation. We are proceeding methodically and cautiously. It may be weeks before we try moving Spirit again."

Forty years after the crew of Apollo 11 landed on the moon, the business of space has yet to experience the renaissance many once thought possible. "It's 2009, and we thought we'd be going to the moon on PanAm by now," said John Pike, an analyst who follows the industry at think tank GlobalSecurity.org. "We thought the number of rockets that would be launched each year would be more and more and it would get cheaper and cheaper, but it didn't happen that way."

Scientists poring over their first close-up data from Mercury in almost 33 years say they're delighted by some new discoveries and astonished by the remarkably sharp view of the planet captured by NASA's Messenger spacecraft during its flyby earlier this week. "We're just jumping up and down as each new image gets examined and new data comes down," said Messenger's principal investigator, Sean Solomon of the Carnegie Institution in Washington.

Caltech has received an eight-year, $24-million grant from the W.M. Keck Foundation to establish a space studies institute dedicated to developing a new generation of space missions and research. The W.M. Keck Institute for Space Studies will consider such sweeping questions as how the universe began, its ultimate fate and the likelihood that life exists elsewhere in the cosmos, Caltech said Tuesday.