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The robotic lander, called Beresheet, launched atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket yesterday evening (Feb. 21) from Florida's Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. If everything goes according to plan, Beresheet will zip around Earth for about six weeks in ever-widening orbits before heading toward its final destination. The craft will arrive in lunar orbit in early April and attempt a landing on the 11th of that month. Beresheet's lengthy stay in Earth orbit may seem surprising. After all, China's Chang'e 4 farside lander reached lunar orbit just 4.5 days after its Dec. 7 liftoff (though Chang'e 4 didn't actually touch...

The trial is for the girl, whose name is Clementine, he said, "a 15-month-old child who was pushed in the face with an open hand with enough force to cause her head to jerk all the back to its full range of motion." Clementine was also cursed at, smacked in the head, hit in the face with a stuffed doll and had tufts of hair yanked out, he said.

Scientists in the US are trying to map the twisting "tubes" so they can be used to cut the cost of space travel. Each one acts like a gravitational version of the Gulf Stream, created from the complex interplay of forces between planets and moons. Depicted by computer graphics, the pathways can look like strands of spaghetti that wrap around planetary bodies and snake between them. The pathways connect sites called Lagrangian points where gravitational forces balance out. Professor Shane Ross, from Virginia Tech university, said: "The idea is there are low energy pathways winding between planets and moons that...

http://www.spaceflightnow.com/news/n0510/28moon3d/ NASA software zooms to nearly anywhere on moon NASA NEWS RELEASE Posted: October 28, 2005 Internet users can now take virtual 3-D trips to nearly anyplace on the moon, thanks to a NASA program first designed to show aerial views of the Earth. The newly expanded NASA 'World Wind' computer program can 'transport' Web users to almost anyplace on the moon, when they zoom in from a global view to closer pictures of our natural satellite taken by the Clementine spacecraft in the 1990s. Computer programmers at NASA Ames Research Center in California's Silicon Valley originally designed the World...

Clementine image of the moon showing the fresh crater believed to be the impact site for the event photographed on November 15, 1953 by amateur astronomer Dr. Leon Stuart. Full press release: NASA Solves Half-Century Old Moon Mystery (click link for additional pictures, including the "Stuart Event" picture of the Moon) In the early morning hours of Nov. 15, 1953, an amateur astronomer in Oklahoma photographed what he believed to be a massive, white-hot fireball of vaporized rock rising from the center of the Moon's face. If his theory was right, Dr. Leon Stuart would be the first and only...