On February 21, 2008 at Google’s headquarters, ten teams announce their intention to participate in Google’s Lunar X Prize competition. Google will award $30 million in prizes for the first two teams to land a robotic rover on the moon and send images and other data back home.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=NzRbi3WPotM
http://www.googlelunarxprize.org/

The new MIT telescopes would explore one of the greatest unknown realms of astronomy, the so-called “Dark Ages” near the beginning of the universe when stars, star clusters and galaxies first came into existence. This period of roughly a billion years, beginning shortly after the Big Bang, closely followed the time when cosmic background radiation, […]

Earlier we reported to you that China’s lunar probe had entered orbit. We are happy to announce that the Red Dragon has unveiled its first photographs of the moon.
This is largely an embarassment.
Compared to the images that have returned from a similar Nihonjin effort, the Chinese photographs look amateurish.
China on Monday publishes its first […]

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and NHK (Japan Broadcasting Corporation) have successfully performed the world’s first high-definition image taking of an Earth-rise* by the lunar explorer “KAGUYA” (SELENE,) which was injected into a lunar orbit at an altitude of about 100 km on October 18, 2007 (Japan Standard Time. Following times and dates are […]

This video from the new orbiter launched from Nihon. Absolutely brilliant. Images from the Chinese orbiter are not yet in.
More data about the mission available here.

A Chinese satellite successfully entered lunar orbit Monday, a month after rival Japan put its own probe into orbit around the moon, but Chinese officials denied there was any competition between the two nations.
http://www.enn.com/sci-tech/article/24267

I thought it was the moon’s helium-3 reserves > the earth’s helium-3 reserves.
This reframes things. I have to reconsider my position.
About 15 million tones of helium-3 isotope is available on Earth. It is abundant on the moon, with estimates of 1-5 million tones. The lunar resources can be used to generate power for more […]

“Sporty rovers” — uhh … yeah.
Who writes this crap?
The next astronauts to work on the moon will likely live in larger habitats and drive sporty new rovers capable of two-week treks, NASA officials said Thursday.
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