Just before 10:30 am Beijing local time on January 3, the robotic spacecraft Chang’e 4 made a soft landing in the South Pole-Aitken Basin area of the moon, otherwise known as the “far side” or “dark side” of Earth’s only natural satellite. It is the first spacecraft in history ...read more
History Flashback takes a look at historical “found footage” of all kinds—newsreels, instructional films, even cartoons—to give us a glimpse into how much things have changed, and how much has remained the same. On October 4, 1957, the USSR launched the first satellite into ...read more
Solar and lunar eclipses—astronomical events that occur when the Earth, the Sun and the Moon are aligned—have figured prominently in human history. Striking to behold, eclipses often were viewed as supernatural phenomena. They also allowed ancient civilizations to develop ...read more
On December 21, 1968, Apollo 8, the first manned mission to the moon, blasted off from present-day Cape Canaveral in Florida. The plan called for the three astronauts onboard to come within about 70 miles of the moon, circle it several times and return safely home, all while ...read more
Chang’e 3 blasted off from Xichang Province in the south of China on December 2 Beijing time, aboard a Chinese-developed Long March 3B rocket. About five days later, it arrived in the moon’s orbit, some 60 miles (100 km) from its surface, and began preparing for landing. During ...read more
1. Full moons make you crazy. Since ancient times, full moons have been associated with odd or insane behavior, including sleepwalking, suicide, illegal activity, fits of violence and, of course, transforming into werewolves. Indeed, the words “lunacy” and “lunatic” come from ...read more
Over the years, scientists have put forth a number of different hypotheses for how the moon formed. In the late 1800s, Charles Darwin’s son George proposed that a chunk of matter spun off from Earth and became our planet’s satellite. According to the “capture” model, meanwhile, ...read more
Earth smashed into Planet Theia. Known as the giant impact hypothesis, the reigning lunar origin theory holds that the moon formed when Earth collided with a planet half its size—roughly as big as Mars—some 4.5 billion years ago. (Scientists call this imagined planet Theia after ...read more
Ranger 7, an unmanned U.S. lunar probe, takes the first close-up images of the moon—4,308 in total—before it impacts with the lunar surface northwest of the Sea of the Clouds. The images were 1,000 times as clear as anything ever seen through earth-bound telescopes. The National ...read more
On this day in 1835, the first in a series of six articles announcing the supposed discovery of life on the moon appears in the New York Sun newspaper. Known collectively as “The Great Moon Hoax,” the articles were supposedly reprinted from the Edinburgh Journal of Science. The ...read more
A Soviet rocket crashes into the moon’s surface, becoming the first man-made object sent from earth to reach the lunar surface. The event gave the Soviets a short-lived advantage in the “space race” and prompted even greater effort by the United States to develop its own space ...read more