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A NASA spacecraft circling the moon is providing the sharpest views yet of the crater carved by a crashing SpaceX rocket. The space agency released before-and-after photos of the impact area on Tuesday. The Falcon rocket's upper stage plowed into the moon at 5,400 mph (8,700 kph) on Aug. 5 after drifting through space for more than a year. It launched a pair of private moon landers with experiments and even a tiny rover in 2025 as part of NASA's push to commercialize lunar exploration. Based on these new photos by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, the fresh crater appears to be 60 feet (18 meters) across and less than 10 feet (3 meters) deep, according to scientists. Dark and bright streaks are clearly visible emanating like butterfly wings from the crater. The darker lines represent excavated material that was close to the surface and shaped by eons of solar wind, cosmic rays and micrometeorite strikes. The brighter rays indicate fresh rocks and dirt that were hurled from farth
Now more than halfway to the moon, the Artemis II astronauts were toasted by Canada on Saturday as they prepared for their historic lunar fly-around to push deeper into space than even the Apollo astronauts. The three Americans and one Canadian will reach their destination Monday, photographing the mysterious lunar far side as they zoom around. It's the first moonbound crew in more than 53 years, picking up where NASA's Apollo programme left off. Artemis II was poised to set a distance record for humans, traveling more than 252,000 miles (400,000 kilometres) from Earth before hanging a U-turn behind the moon and heading home without stopping or entering lunar orbit. The record is currently held by Apollo 13. The Canadian Space Agency celebrated the country's role in the mission, speaking from Quebec with astronaut Jeremy Hansen as he headed toward his lunar rendezvous. Hansen is the first non-US citizen to fly to the moon. "Today he is making history for Canada," said Canadian Spac
ISRO on Saturday said it has collected advanced data from the Chandrayaan-2 lunar orbiter to gain a deeper understanding of the Moon's polar regions, including parameters describing the physical and dielectric properties of its surface. This is India's major value addition towards future global exploration of the Moon, it said. According to an ISRO statement, the Chandrayaan-2 Orbiter has been in orbit around the Moon since 2019 and has been providing high-quality data. One of the payloads, the Dual Frequency Synthetic Aperture Radar (DFSAR), is the first instrument that has mapped the Moon using the L-band in full-polarimetric mode and in the highest resolution (25m/pixel). This advanced radar mode sends and receives signals in both vertical and horizontal directions, making it ideal for studying surface properties, it said. The space agency said that since its launch, about 1,400 radar datasets have been collected and processed to create polarimetric mosaics of the north and sou