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By NASA
On June 11, NASA’s LRO (Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter) captured photos of the site where the ispace Mission 2 SMBC x HAKUTO-R Venture Moon (RESILIENCE) lunar lander experienced a hard landing on June 5, 2025, UTC.
RESILIENCE lunar lander impact site, as seen by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) on June 11, 2025. The lander created a dark smudge surrounded by a subtle bright halo.Credit: NASA/Goddard/Arizona State University. RESILIENCE was launched on Jan. 15 on a privately funded spacecraft.
LRO’s right Narrow Angle Camera (one in a suite of cameras known as LROC) captured the images featured here from about 50 miles above the surface of Mare Frigoris, a volcanic region interspersed with large-scale faults known as wrinkle ridges.
The dark smudge visible above the arrow in the photo formed as the vehicle impacted the surface, kicking up regolith — the rock and dust that make up Moon “soil.” The faint bright halo encircling the site resulted from low-angle regolith particles scouring the delicate surface.
This animation shows the RESILIENCE site before and after the impact. In the image, north is up. Looking from west to east, or left to right, the area pictured covers 2 miles.Credit: NASA/Goddard/Arizona State University. LRO is managed by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. Launched on June 18, 2009, LRO has collected a treasure trove of data with its seven powerful instruments, making an invaluable contribution to our knowledge about the Moon. NASA is returning to the Moon with commercial and international partners to expand human presence in space and bring back new knowledge and opportunities.
More on this story from Arizona State University’s LRO Camera website
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Last Updated Jun 20, 2025 EditorMadison OlsonContactMolly Wassermolly.l.wasser@nasa.govLocationGoddard Space Flight Center Related Terms
Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) Earth's Moon View the full article
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By NASA
This full-disk image from NOAA’s GOES-13 satellite shows the Americas at the start of astronomical summer in the Northern Hemisphere on June 21, 2012.NASA This full-disk image from NOAA’s GOES-13 satellite was captured at 7:45 a.m. EDT (11:45 UTC) and shows the Americas on June 21, 2012, the start of astronomical summer – in the Northern Hemisphere – that year.
The first day of summer in 2025 is June 20; it is also the longest day of the year. In the Southern Hemisphere, it’s the shortest day of the year and the beginning of winter.
Earth orbits at an angle, so the Northern Hemisphere is tilted toward the Sun half of the year — this is summer in the Northern Hemisphere, and winter in the Southern Hemisphere. The other half of the year, the Northern Hemisphere is tilted away from the Sun, creating winter in the north and summer in the south. Solstices happen twice per year, at the points in Earth’s orbit where this tilt is most pronounced.
Image credit: NASA
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By NASA
7 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
In the summer 2025 issue of the NASA History Office’s News & Notes newsletter, examples of leadership and critical decision-making in NASA’s history form the unifying theme. Among the topics discussed are NASA’s Shuttle-Centaur program, assessing donations to the NASA Archives, how the discovery of the first exoplanet orbiting a sun-like star catalyzed NASA’s exoplanet program, and Chief of the Medical Operations Office Charles A. Berry’s decisions surrounding crew health when planning the Project Gemini missions.
Volume 42, Number 2
Summer 2025
Featured Articles
From the Chief Historian
By Brian Odom
NASA’s is a history marked by critical decisions. From George Mueller’s 1963 decision for “all up” testing of the Saturn V rocket to Michael Griffin’s 2006 decision to launch a final servicing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope, the agency has continually met key inflection points with bold decisions. These choices, such as the decision to send a crewed Apollo 8 mission around the Moon in December 1968, stand at the center of the agency’s national legacy and promote confidence in times of crisis. Continue Reading
Shuttle-Centaur: Loss of Launch Vehicle Redundancy Leads to Discord
By Robert Arrighi
“Although the Shuttle/Centaur decision was very difficult to make, it is the proper thing to do, and this is the time to do it.” With those words on June 19, 1986, NASA Administrator James Fletcher canceled the intensive effort to integrate the Centaur upper stage with the Space Shuttle to launch the Galileo and Ulysses spacecraft. The decision, which was tied to increased safety measures following the loss of Challenger several months earlier, brought to the forefront the 1970s decision to launch all U.S. payloads with the Space Shuttle. Continue Reading
Lewis Director Andy Stofan speaks at the Shuttle-Centaur rollout ceremony on August 23, 1985 at General Dynamics’s San Diego headquarters. Galileo mission crew members Dave Walker, Rick Hauck, and John Fabian were among those on stage. NASA A View into NASA’s Response to the Apollo 1 Tragedy
By Kate Mankowski
On January 27, 1967, Mission AS-204 (later known as Apollo 1) was conducting a simulated countdown when a fire suddenly broke out in the spacecraft, claiming the lives of astronauts Virgil I. “Gus” Grissom, Edward H. White, and Roger B. Chaffee. The disaster highlighted the risks that come with spaceflight and the work that still needed to be accomplished to meet President Kennedy’s challenge of going to the Moon before the end of the decade. With the complexity of the Apollo spacecraft, discerning the cause of the fire proved to be incredibly difficult. Continue Reading
The Fight to Fund AgRISTARS
By Brad Massey
Robert MacDonald, the manager of NASA’s Large Area Crop Inventory Experiment (LACIE), was not pleased in January 1978 after he read a draft copy of the U.S. General Accounting Office’s (GAO’s) “Crop Forecasting by Satellite: Progress and Problems” report. The draft’s authors argued that LACIE had not achieved its goals of accurately predicting harvest yields in the mid-1970s. Therefore, congressional leaders should “be aware of the disappointing performance of LACIE to date when considering the future direction of NASA’s Landsat program and the plans of the Department of Agriculture.” Continue Reading
The Hubble Space Telescope: The Right Project at the Right Time
By Jillian Rael
This year, NASA commemorates 35 years of the Hubble Space Telescope’s study of the cosmos. From observations of never-before-seen phenomena within our solar system, to the discovery of distant galaxies, the confirmation of the existence of supermassive black holes, and precision measurements of the universe’s expansion, Hubble has made incredible contributions to science, technology, and even art. Yet, for all its contemporary popularity, the Hubble program initially struggled for congressional approval and consequential funding. For its part, NASA found new ways to compromise and cut costs, while Congress evaluated national priorities and NASA’s other space exploration endeavors against the long-range value of Hubble. Continue Reading
Within the tempestuous Carina Nebula lies “Mystic Mountain.”NASA/ESA/M. Livio/Hubble 20th Anniversary Team Appraisal: The Science and Art of Assessing Donations to the NASA Archives
By Alan Arellano
The major functions of an archivist center include appraising, arranging, describing, preserving, and providing access to historical records and documents. While together these are pillars of archival science, they are more of an art than a science in their application, fundamentally necessitating skilled decision making. Throughout the NASA archives, staff members make these decisions day in and day out. Continue Reading
Orbit Shift: How 50 Pegasi b Helped Pull NASA Toward the Stars in the 1990s
By Lois Rosson
On October 20, 1995, the New York Times reported the detection of a distant planet orbiting a Sun-like star. The star, catalogued as 51 Pegasi by John Flamsteed in the 18th century, was visible to the naked eye as part of the constellation Pegasus—and had wobbled on its axis just enough that two Swiss astronomers were able to deduce the presence of another object exerting its gravitational pull on the star’s rotation. The discovery was soon confirmed by other astronomers, and 51 Pegasi b was heralded as the first confirmed exoplanet orbiting a star similar to our own Sun. Continue Reading
Detail from an infographic about 51 Pegasi b and the significance of its discovery.NASA Four, Eight, Fourteen Days: Charles A. Berry, Gemini, and the Critical Steps to Living and Working in Space
By Jennifer Ross-Nazzal
In 1963, critical decisions had to be made about NASA’s upcoming Gemini missions if the nation were to achieve President John F. Kennedy’s lunar goals. Known as the bridge to Apollo, Project Gemini was critical to landing a man on the Moon by the end of the decade and returning him safely to Earth. The project would demonstrate that astronauts could rendezvous and dock their spacecraft to another space vehicle and give flight crews the opportunity to test the planned extravehicular capabilities in preparation for walking on the lunar surface on future Apollo flights. Perhaps most importantly, Gemini had to show that humans could live and work in space for long periods of time, a fiercely debated topic within and outside of the agency. Continue Reading
Dr. Charles Berry prepares to check the blood pressure of James A. McDivitt, Command Pilot for the Gemini IV mission. McDivitt is on the tilt table at the Aero Medical Area, Merritt Island, FL, where he and Gemini IV pilot Edward H. White II underwent preflight physicals in preparation for their four-day spaceflight.NASA Imagining Space: The Life and Art of Robert McCall
By Sandra Johnson
As we walked into Bob McCall’s Arizona home, it quickly became obvious that two talented and creative people lived there. Tasked with interviewing one of the first artists to be invited to join the NASA Art Program, our oral history team quickly realized the session with McCall would include a unique perspective on NASA’s history. We traveled to Arizona in the spring of 2000 to capture interviews with some of the pioneers of spaceflight and had already talked to an eclectic group of subjects in their homes, including a flight controller for both Gemini and Apollo, an astronaut who had flown on both Skylab and Space Shuttle missions, a former NASA center director, and two former Women’s Airforce Service Pilots (WASPs) who ferried airplanes during WWII. However, unlike most interviews, the setting itself provided a rare glimpse into the man and his inspiration. Continue Reading
Inside the Archives: Biomedical Branch Files
By Alejandra Lopez
The Biomedical Branch Files (1966–2008) in the Johnson Space Center archives showcase the inner workings of a NASA office established to perform testing to provide a better understanding of the impacts of spaceflight on the human body. Ranging from memos and notes to documents and reports, this collection is an invaluable resource on the biomedical research done with NASA’s Apollo, Skylab, Space Shuttle, and Space Station projects. Files in the collection cover work done by groups within the branch such as the Toxicology, Microbiology, Clinical, and Biochemistry Laboratories. It also reveals the branch’s evolution and changes in its decision-making process over the years. Continue Reading
Dr. Carolyn S. Huntoon, shown here in 1972, became the Biomedical Branch’s first chief in 1977.NASA Download the Summer 2025 Edition More Issues of NASA History News and Notes Share
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Last Updated Jun 20, 2025 EditorMichele Ostovar Related Terms
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By European Space Agency
Week in images: 16-20 June 2025
Discover our week through the lens
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