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NASA and private industry have planned various technologies for exploring the solar system, despite concerns that such programs are affecting NASA funding for basic earth science research. NASA has announced development of the Crew Exploration Vehicle, called Orion, to take astronauts to the moon by 2020. It has plans to launch a Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) rover by 2009 to explore Mars, while the private Spaceward Foundation is exploring technologies to literally 'lift' people and cargo into space by an elevator.

Scientists are studying the Earth-like geological features of Saturn's largest moon Titan, with radar images providing details of the presence of rivers, hills, mountains, valleys and craters on a bright, Australia-sized land mass called Xanadu. The presence of dark lake- and river-like erosion features on Titan's surface may indicate the transportation of methane from the moon's crust into the atmosphere to account for its atmospheric methane budget.

David Stevenson, a researcher, believes that a small moon called Enceladus that orbits Saturn has unique Earth-like qualities, leading to theories of possibility of life on it. He asserts that Mars is the most appropriate place to look for life, since Mars had an Earth-like environment early in its history.

The image of the Neil Armstrong's landmark first steps on the moon, which was taped and telecasted, was not of a very good quality. The tapes held signals transmitted directly from the Apollo II TV camera on the moon to three monitoring stations on Earth, where the signal showed up as quality images on specially designed monitors.

Planetary scientists have found several spots near the north pole of the moon, which receive continuous sunlight during the pole's lunar summer, making them prospective locations for future solar-powered equipment. Astronomers suspected that the moon's north pole might have permanently sunlit locations, as the moon's axis is tilted only 1.5 degrees relative to its orbital plane.

The praise was polyglot, but the sense of it was clear enough: incredible, magnificent, astonishing. The European probe Huygens had blazed into the upper atmosphere of Saturn's big moon Titan, [...]

Like the dog that didn't bark in the night, the sunlight that didn't glint off the surface of Saturn's big moon Titan spoke volumes. When the Cassini spacecraft flew by [...]

In a recent Icarus article, Shkuratov and Bondarenko (2001) propose a model for the depth of the lunar regolith based on 70-cm radar observations and near-infrared spectroscopy. This model treats the regolith as a single homogeneous layer of lossy dust, and ignores scattering by buried rocks. There is also an implicit assumption that the regolith substrate is everywhere of uniform morphology. Radar scattering from this substrate is treated using averaged Fresnel coefficients, with little explanation of how such a model might produce the observed lunar polarization properties. Taken together, these issues weaken the validity of the published regolith depth map. Key Words: Moon; surface; regolith; radar.

What Has Caused the Secular Increase in Solar Nitrogen-15? STREAMING OUT FROM THE SUN AT A FEW HUNDRED KILOMETERS per second, the ions of the solar wind possess enough energy [...]

The 2009 discovery of water on the moon came as a surprise, since current thought was that the moon was dry. At that time most scientists concluded that the moon's [...]

The Clementine spacecraft, which made a topographic survey of the Moon and the lunar gravity field, provides evidence for the existence of several impact basins on the lunar surface. Imaging studies confirm the abundance of ferromagnesium materials on the floor of the significant South Pole-Aitken basin. The gravity and topography of some impact basins that remain unfilled by mare basalt deposits are not consistent with complete isostatic compensation.

The crust beneath the Moon's heavily battered surface is almost entirely pulverized, indicating that it took an even greater beating from space debris during the Solar System's first billion years [...]

Geophys. Res. Lett. doi: 10.1029/2009GL040635 (2009) A craft orbiting the Moon has discovered an apparent 65-metre-wide opening into a deep lava tube, offering a possible site for a station from [...]