ISRO has been publishing monthly summaries of the varied activities and programs of India’s Department of Space (DOS) for years. Lately though, there have been consistent delays in publishing them by ...

Pre-launch photo and renders of the SPADEX satellites. ISRO designed the satellites such that either could act as the chaser and the other as target for docking. Images: ISRO Illustration of the ...

India has formally approved the joint ISRO-JAXA Chandrayaan 5 (LUPEX) mission to study water ice on the Moon’s south pole. The mission and its approval are notable in many ways as we’ll see below.

The fact that the Moon’s gravitational field is lumpy was first noticed by the Soviets when they found that their Luna 10 spacecraft was significantly deviating from its orbit. Shortly after, NASA ...

For most of the 20th century, scientists thought the Moon’s surface was bone-dry. The 382 kilograms of rock and soil samples brought by the Apollo missions to Earth attested to this. When they did ...

The Moon’s farside hosts the spectacular 312-kilometers wide Schrödinger crater with its crown-shaped mountain ring formed 3.8 to 3.9 billion years ago. The 312 kilometers wide Schrödinger crater, as ...

The Moon is host to a type of bright feature quite glaringly called swirls. Here is the lunar swirl of Reiner Gamma. Beautiful and bright lunar swirl of Reiner Gamma. It spans well over a hundred ...

Where did our Moon come from? The origin of our cosmic neighbor is a fundamental question in planetary science. From Galileo’s first telescopic observations of the Moon to humans walking on its ...

Updates on CLPS, ispace, Artemis, Chandrayaan 4, and more. Read to the end for a fact check on an op-ed. How long do you think this hold is going to be? We don't have a lot of gas to play with," one ...

A not-to-scale representation of ISRO’s Venus orbiter mission Shukrayaan. Credit: ISRO Edit in October 2024: I’ve written a new, much longer article on ISRO’s Venus Orbiter after India approved the ...

Advancing our understanding of water across the Moon for exploration and science. Much like Chandrayaan 1, Trailblazer has an infrared spectrometer to detect water and hydroxyl (OH) molecules based on ...

Cassini spacecraft’s views of huge water plumes erupting from Enceladus’ south pole. Credit: NASA JPL When Cassini flew through Enceladus’ plumes between 2008 to 2015, its mass spectrometer found a ...