All Stories

When the Apollo 17 spacecraft carrying U.S. astronauts Gene Cernan, Harrison Schmitt, and Ron Evans returned to Earth on December 19, 1972, the Apollo lunar landing program came to its end. No human has set foot on the Moon’s surface since.

Could humans one day live on other planets? Many efforts are underway to answer that question.

The Moon is pockmarked with impact craters. Everywhere you look, you can see a crater. On Earth, however, impact craters are few and far between, with barely any visible. Why do we see so many craters on the Moon but so few on Earth?

The oldest Earth rocks we have are 4.3 billion years old, and samples we've brought back from the Moon are even older. But what what does that have to do with craters on Mars? 

James E. Martin, an electronics technician who worked in the RCA Space Center, helped build the Ranger 7 spacecraft’s camera system, which sent back over 4,000 detailed images in less than 17 minutes before crashing into the Moon in 1964.

A moon is a planetary body that goes around another planetary body. Usually, this is one or more moons going around a planet, but it doesn’t have to be a planet. In Star Wars, the Death Star is not a moon because it isn’t a naturally occurring satellite: the International Space Station, the Juno spacecraft orbiting Jupiter, or any of the telecommunications satellites we rely on in low Earth orbit are satellites, but are not moons.

Recent discoveries and news in aviation and space. 

It's a bird? It's a plane? Its a guy pretending to be a bird?? We have a very odd aircraft in the collection. 

This dark side is also known as the farside (and the side facing Earth is called the nearside). The phrase "dark side of the Moon" is used to refer to something mysterious or unknown. For most of human history we did not know what the farside of the Moon looked like. It wasn’t until 1959 when the Soviet Union launched the Luna 3 spacecraft that we got our first look at the farside.

Over six missions, the Apollo astronauts collected and brought back 842 pounds of Lunar samples. Who decides what rocks go where? And how did the National Cathedral get a rock to put in a stained glass window??