Moon’s craters could be coldest spot in solar system

October 7th, 2009 LONDON - An enormous ring around Saturn - by far the largest of the giant planet's many rings - has been discovered by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. The new belt lies at the far reaches of the Saturnian system, with an orbit tilted 27 degrees from the main ring plane.

September 19th, 2009 LONDON - Two separate lunar missions have found evidence which indicates that the polar regions of the moon are chock full of water-altered minerals. According to a report in Nature News, early results from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), launched on June 18, are offering a wide array of watery signals.

September 18th, 2009 WASHINGTON - NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, or LRO, has successfully completed its testing and calibration phase and entered its mapping orbit of the moon's south pole. The spacecraft already has made significant progress toward creating the most detailed atlas of the moon's south pole to date.

September 17th, 2009 Coldest place in the solar system? Right nearbyWASHINGTON — Astronomers have found the coldest spot in our solar system and it may be a little close for comfort. It's on our moon, right nearby.

September 14th, 2009 LONDON - Scientists, using the Cassini spacecraft's Magnetospheric Imaging instrument (MIMI), have detected a new, temporary radiation belt at Saturn, located around the orbit of its moon Dione at about 377,000 km from the centre of the planet. Radiation belts, like Earth's Van Allen belts, have been discovered at Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.

September 13th, 2009 LONDON - There are thousands of habitable moons orbiting planets in other solar systems trillions of miles from our own, British scientists say. On the basis of mathematical calculations, scientists at the University College London have said that it should be possible to spot these moons using a space telescope launched by NASA.

September 12th, 2009 SYDNEY - In a new study, scientists have determined that giant gas planets like Jupiter, which orbit close to their parent star, could harbour moons the size of Earth. According to a report by ABC News, the study was led by graduate student Tim Cassidy from the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, US.

August 26th, 2009 LONDON - In a new study, a team of scientists has described how aluminium radioisotopes can now offer precise timing of events 4.5 billion years ago, and thus have been dubbed as the 'stopwatch for the solar system'. According to a report by BBC News, the study shows that the rate of decay of isotopes can now be relied upon to give accurate measures of time for that period.

August 7th, 2009 WASHINGTON - A new research indicates that Saturn's haze-enshrouded moon Titan turns out to have much in common with Earth in the way that weather and geology shape its terrain. Wind, rain, volcanoes, tectonics and other Earth-like processes all sculpt features on Titan's complex and varied surface in an environment more than 100 degrees Celsius colder on average than Antarctica.

July 22nd, 2009 WASHINGTON - A scientist has said that the 40th anniversary of the Apollo lunar landing is a time to look back and, especially, an opportunity to look forward to future space exploration, including the Moon missions now being planned by NASA and other space agencies. Mark A. Bishop, an associate research scientist with the Tucson-based Planetary Science Institute, made the statement.

July 4th, 2009 WASHINGTON - A team of scientists has for the first time observed energetic neutral atoms scattered off the Moon from the incoming solar wind ion beam. When the solar wind, made up mostly of ionized hydrogen, hits the Moon, most of it is absorbed, but some is reemitted as energetic neutral atoms.

June 19th, 2009 WASHINGTON - NASA's Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) spacecraft has made the first observations of very fast hydrogen atoms coming from the Moon, following decades of speculation and searching for their existence. During spacecraft commissioning, the IBEX team turned on the IBEX-Hi instrument, built primarily by Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) and the Los Alamos National Laboratory, which measures atoms with speeds from about half a million to 2.5 million miles per hour.

June 19th, 2009 WASHINGTON - NASA scientists have created a new lunar topography map with the highest resolution of the Moon's rugged south polar region, which provides new information on some of out natural satellite's darkest craters. The map was created by scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, who collected the data using the Deep Space Network's Goldstone Solar System Radar located in California's Mojave Desert.

June 11th, 2009 London, June 11 (ANI: A new analysis of craters of the Moon has suggested that the shattered remnants of a dwarf planet may have bombarded the inner planets in the early solar system. According to a report in New Scientist, several large impact scars on the moon appear to be around 3.9 billion years old, suggesting that the Earth and other objects of the inner solar system were heavily pounded at that time.

February 18th, 2009 WASHINGTON - The US space agency NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) would conduct missions to Jupiter, Saturn and many moons that circle the planets, the agencies announced. The missions include sending multiple spacecraft to the Jupiter and Saturn systems to explore the planets and their unique satellites, such as Jupiter's ice-covered Europa and Saturn's shrouded moon Titan.