Earth's Moon

NASA has announced a call for Lunar Surface Instrument and Technology Payloads that will fly to the Moon on commercial lunar landers as early as next year or 2020.

The next full Moon will be on Wednesday mid-day, October 24, 2018.

On Saturday, October 20, NASA will host the ninth annual International Observe the Moon Night.

Celebrate International Observe the Moon Night with your local astronomy club.

Quite a few candles have been lit since NASA was born on Oct. 1, 1958. Here’s a quick look back at some highlights from six decades of exploration—and a glimpse of what’s ahead.

NASA recently submitted to Congress a plan to revitalize and add direction to NASA’s enduring purpose.

Tools that can quickly reveal a terrain’s chemistry and form will help astronauts explore new worlds.

Did somebody say space laser? NASA is set to launch ICESat-2, our most advanced laser instrument of its kind, into orbit around Earth on Sept. 15.

In the darkest and coldest parts of its polar regions, a team of scientists has directly observed definitive evidence of water ice on the Moon’s surface.

To most of us, dust is an annoyance. But these tiny particles that float about and settle on surfaces play an important role across the solar system.

When you see these prominent features of Ceres, you might recognize some of their Earthly cousins.

A new study uses Earth as a stand-in for an exoplanet and shows that even with very little light -- as little as one pixel -- it is still possible to measure key characteristics of distant worlds.

A new multiagency report outlines how the U.S. could become better prepared for near-Earth objects—asteroids and comets whose orbits come within 30 million miles of Earth—otherwise known as NEOs.

Asteroid 2018 LA entered Earth’s atmosphere at about 9:44 a.m. PDT (12:44 p.m. EDT, 16:44 UTC), and later disintegrated in the upper atmosphere near Botswana, Africa.

NASA and its partners are blending ocean and space exploration, with a project called SUBSEA, short for Systematic Underwater Biogeochemical Science and Exploration Analog. Lessons learned in both fields will be mutually beneficial and could help design future science-focused missions across the solar system.

There are over 3,700 planets in our galaxy. Spend Memorial Day barbecuing it up on any of these alien worlds.

“Alan Bean once said ‘I have the nicest life in the world.’ It’s a comforting sentiment to recall as we mourn his passing."

As NASA shifts human exploration back to the Moon, U.S. commercial partnerships will be a key to expediting missions and building a sustainable presence on the lunar surface.

Scheduled to launch no earlier than May 22, the twin satellites of the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment Follow-On (GRACE-FO) mission will continue the work of monitoring changes in the world's water cycle and surface mass.

Every time you take a breath of fresh air, it’s easy to forget you can safely do so because of Earth’s atmosphere. What makes the atmosphere special, and how do other planets’ atmospheres compare?

Scientists working with NASA’s Magnetospheric Multiscale spacecraft have uncovered a new type of magnetic event in our near-Earth environment.

NASA is returning to the Moon with commercial and international partners as part of an overall agency Exploration Campaign in support of Space Policy Directive 1.

In December 2017, President Donald J. Trump gave NASA a new direction, telling the agency to work with international and commercial partners to refocus exploration efforts on the moon, with an eye to eventually going on to Mars and even beyond.

Every day, all over the world, enthusiastic amateurs are making discoveries and valuable contributions—no fancy degrees or resumes needed.

Legendary explorers and visionaries, real and fictitious, are among those immortalized in the first set of official surface-feature names for Pluto's largest moon, Charon.