Lunar

We're going to be on the Moon more often soon, and we'll need places to rest and work there. Building habitats and maintaining them will be tough, but bacteria could come to the rescue by helping repair cracked bricks made from lunar soil.

Honeybee Robotics has outlined a plan to build a kind of power grid on the Moon, with a network of Statue of Liberty-sized towers containing solar panels and batteries that provide power and communications, and even act as streetlights.

When you live on the Moon, your only option for commuting back to Earth or on to Mars will be some kind of rocket. But each launch will kick up a hellstorm of debris. Building walls to contain the mess could be a perfect job for autonomous rovers.

Graphene has been found on the Moon. The so-called “wonder material” was detected in a sample of lunar soil returned by a Chinese lander.

Scientists have developed what could be a much quicker and easier technique for astronauts to make building-construction bricks out of lunar soil. The secret lies in heating that moon dust, then sticking it in an aerospace-grade microwave oven.

A somewhat scorched Chang'e-6 return craft landed in Inner Mongolia yesterday, bringing with it the first rock and dust samples from the far side of the Moon – and hopes of unlocking some lunar secrets.

China's uncrewed Chang'e-6 has successfully landed on the far side of the Moon, where it will gather lunar rock and soil samples from the unexplored region for the first time in history. On-board cameras caught the moment it touched down.

It's a genuine joy watching Apollo-era astronauts bounce around on the lunar surface, and it's hysterically funny watching them fall over and struggle to get back up in their spacesuits. MIT wishes to rob us of this hilarity for future missions.

Many asteroids can be traced back to their parent body – the planet or moon they broke off from. But for the first time, scientists now claim to have traced the origins of an asteroid back to the specific crater it was birthed from.

NASA has selected three companies to develop extreme off-road vehicles that astronauts will drive on the Moon during Artemis missions starting in 2030, awarding US$4.6 billion in contracts to Intuitive Machines, Lunar Outpost and Venturi Astrolab.

Toyota's CALTY Design Research celebrates its 50th anniversary this year, having been responsible for "everything from the 1978 Toyota Celica to the 2024 Toyota Tacoma." The futuristic Baby Lunar Cruiser concept has been created to mark the occasion.

After an initial disappointment, Jeff Bezos is back in the Moon business. NASA selected Blue Origin's Blue Moon crewed lander for the space agency's Artemis V mission to the lunar South Pole in 2029 under a firm-fixed price contract of (US)$3.4 billion.