Today, India's Chandrayaan-3 became the first spacecraft to successfully land near the lunar south pole, and India became the fourth country to make a soft landing anywhere on lunar soil, following the former Soviet Union, the United States, and China. The robotic vehicle touched down at 8:33 Eastern time, nearly six weeks after its launch. The craft includes a four-legged lander and a small rover to study the lunar regolith and look for signs of water ice during a two-week mission. On August 20, the craft malfunctioned and appears to have crashed while preparing for a landing planned for the next day. Roscosmos, Russia's space agency, intended to deploy Luna-25 for a year-long mission near the Boguslavsky impact crater, where its eight scientific instruments would also have examined properties of the regolith and pockets of water ice.

The moon's polar regions are home to craters and other depressions that never receive sunlight. Today, a group of researchers led by the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS) in Germany present the highest-resolution images to date covering 17 such craters. Craters of this type could contain frozen water, making them attractive targets for future lunar missions, and the researchers focused further on relatively small and accessible craters surrounded by gentle slopes. In fact, three of the craters have turned out to lie within the just-announced mission area of NASA's Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER), which is scheduled to touch down on the moon in 2023. Imaging the interior of permanently shadowed craters is difficult, and efforts so far have relied on long exposure times resulting in smearing and lower resolution. By taking advantage of reflected sunlight from nearby hills and a novel image processing method, the researchers have now produced images at 1–2 meters per pixel, which is at or very close to the best capability of the cameras.

As NASA attempts to return to the moon in 2024, the U.S. space agency has tasked Lockheed Martin and General Motors to create a new electric, autonomous lunar rover. The rover will use GM's autonomous driving technology and allow it to go'significantly farther' than the ones the auto maker worked on during the Apollo program, some 50 years ago. Though the rover is still in the planning stages, both companies highlighted that it is imperative it allows astronauts to traverse difficult terrains of the lunar south pole, which could hold a number of interesting discoveries, including water. A concept of what the Lockheed Martin-GM rover might look like on the moon's south pole The lunar south pole is a site of interest for scientists and agencies planning crewed missions to the Moon. This is because water ice has been found in shadowed areas in that region with craters that never get sunlight.

NASA's Artemis program will mark a significant milestone in US space flight history when it lifts off in late 2024. Not only will it be the first time that American astronauts have travelled further than LEO since the 1970s, and not only will it be the first opportunity for a female astronaut to step foot on the moon. The Artemis mission will perform the crucial groundwork needed for humanity to further explore and potentially colonize our nearest celestial neighbor as well as eventually serve as a jumping-off point in our quest to reach Mars. Given how inhospitable space is to human physiology and psychology, however, NASA and its partners will face a significant challenge in keeping their lunar colonists alive and well. Back in the Apollo mission era, the notion of constructing even a semi-permanent presence on the surface of the moon was laughable -- largely because the numerous lunar regolith samples collected and returned to Earth during that period were "found to be dry as a bone," Rob Mueller, Senior Technologist in Advanced Projects Development at NASA said during a SXSW 2021 panel.

The moon is a treasure trove of valuable resources. Gold, platinum, and many rare Earth metals await extraction to be used in next-generation electronics. But there's one resource in particular that has excited scientists, rocket engineers, space agency officials, industry entrepreneurs--virtually anyone with a vested interest in making spaceflight to distant worlds more affordable. If you split water into hydrogen and oxygen, and then liquefy those constituents, you have rocket fuel. If you can stop at the moon's orbit or a lunar base to refuel, you no longer need to bring all your propellant with you as you take off, making your spacecraft significantly lighter and cheaper to launch.

NASA will send a golf cart-sized robot to the moon in 2022 to search for deposits of water below the surface, an effort to evaluate the vital resource ahead of a planned human return to the moon in 2024 to possibly use it for astronauts to drink and to make rocket fuel, the U.S. space agency said on Friday. The VIPER robot will drive for miles (km) on the dusty lunar surface to get a closer look at what NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine has touted for months: underground pockets of "hundreds of millions of tons of water ice" that could help turn the moon into a jumping-off point to Mars. "VIPER is going to assess where the water ice is. We're going to be able to characterize the water ice, and ultimately drill," Bridenstine said on Friday at the International Astronautical Congress in Washington. Because water ice represents something significant.

Fox News Flash top headlines for Oct. 25 are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com NASA has unveiled its plan to send a new lunar rover, VIPER, to the surface of the Moon. "VIPER is going to rove on the South Pole of the moon and assess where the water ice is," said NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine during a wide-ranging speech at the International Astronautical Congress in Washington D.C. on Friday. The government space agency notes that the Moon has vast reservoirs of water ice, an amount that could potentially reach millions of tons.

The globe of Mars, as seen in a mosaic of images from the Viking orbiters. In the Martian north, summer brings a nightly dusting of snow. This surprising scene comes courtesy of new simulations of flip-flopping layers in the Martian atmosphere, which mix more vigorously than expected and produce stormy weather. Though still virtual, the snow shower fits quite well with an observation made by a robot placed on Mars in 2008--and it may offer an explanation for how a very different type of snow falls out of the red planet's polar skies. If the simulations are correct, the summertime snow on Mars happens in bursts that can last for several hours, scientists report in a study describing the find published today in the journal Nature Geoscience.