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 ...

The farside also lacked the Moon’s familiar dark splotches. Formed as a result of active volcanism over 3 billion years ago, it was anyone’s guess why dark lava plains cover about 31% of the nearside ...

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.

How will ISRO go from Chandrayaan 3 to an Indian on the Moon? Clarifying and laying down India’s plans for increasingly complex robotic lunar missions, where human spaceflight comes in, and what ...

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 ...

Here’s an attempt at a neutral overview of India’s first Mars mission and its actual impact, one which doesn’t stick to its cost effectiveness at any cost. ISRO originally intended to launch ...

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 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 ...

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 ...

To piece together this story, I spoke to experts from JAXA, NASA, and ISRO. When Japan’s solar-powered SLIM lander made a lopsided-but-successful touchdown on the Moon on January 19, most news ...

Update in January 2024: KPLO has not only been successfully capturing beautiful high resolution images of the Moon’s surface but uniquely studying it for various scientific purposes. On August 5, 2022 ...