Moon

Neil Armstrong , the astronaut who marked an epochal achievement in exploration with "one small step" from the Apollo 11 lunar module on July 20, 1969, becoming the first person to walk on the moon, died Aug. 25 in the Cincinnati area. He was 82. His family announced the death in a statement and attributed it to "complications resulting from cardiovascular procedures. " A taciturn engineer and test pilot who was never at ease with his fame, Mr. Armstrong was among the most heroized Americans of the 1960s...

IRVING, Texas — Sang-Moon Bae led by four strokes in the final round of the Byron Nelson Championship when his tee shot at the ninth hole went way left. After getting to his ball, Bae hit a high-arcing shot over the trees in front of him, clearing the green and apparently going into the water — nobody seemed to know for sure where it went. He took a drop in deep grass after conferring with a rules official. "I don't know, where is it?" Bae was able to joke Sunday after his first PGA Tour...

Michael Crichton once wrote that if you told a physicist in 1899 that within a hundred years humankind would, among other wonders (nukes, commercial airlines), "travel to the moon, and then lose interest . . . the physicist would almost certainly pronounce you mad. " In 2000, I quoted these lines expressing Crichton's incredulity at America's abandonment of the moon. It is now 2009 and the moon recedes ever further. Next week marks the 40th anniversary of the first moon landing. We say we will return in 2020.

NICOSIA, Cyprus — Cyprus may finally get its piece of the moon. Some 40 years ago, the Mediterranean island nation was supposed to receive a 1.1 gram piece of moon rock from the United States. The rock was one of 270 such lunar samples U.S. astronauts brought back from Apollo moon missions in 1969 and 1972 that the Nixon administration gave as gifts to foreign countries. But the item vanished — allegedly taken by a relative of an American diplomat. And with Cyprus reeling from war and internal strife...

My fellow Apollo astronaut and lunar module pilot, Buzz Aldrin, favors Mars over the moon [" Time to Boldly Go Once More ," op-ed, July 16]. His vision for space policy, however, requires clear thinking instead of just "bold thinking," and Mr. Aldrin missed on several points. The moon is hardly a "dead end. " If that were true, China and other countries would not be so interested. Rather than being "a poor location for homesteading," the moon is ideal for that purpose. Its soils provide resources necessary to support settlements, including an...

Walk the Moon's self-titled second album could be labeled power-pop, synth-rock or neo-punk-funk. But a more apt term might be "MP3 rock. " This Cincinnati quartet's recordings are so stuffed with sound that they verge on airless, and so amped that they seem loud at any volume. Subtle it's not, but "Walk the Moon" is brisk and catchy. And the band's hyperbolic style suits singer-keyboard player Nicholas Petricca's songs, which are mostly about youthful bravado and boyish lust. "I Can Lift a Car," boasts one song title, while "Anna Sun," the album's...

Two scientists are theorizing that the moon was once part of the Earth and that it formed after the Earth collided with another body. In a paper published last week in the journal Science , Sarah Stewart and Matija Cuk said their theory would explain why the Earth and the moon have similar composition and chemistry. The Earth was spinning much faster at the time the moon was formed, they said, with a day lasting only two to three hours. With the Earth spinning so quickly, a giant impact could have launched...

Once and for all scientists have set out to determine if the moon is made of green cheese. Earlier this month NASA (the National Aeronautics and Space Administration) launched two probes whose job it is to find out what's inside the moon. While more than 100 spacecraft, including six with astronauts, have been sent to the moon, the interior has remained a mystery. Scientist Maria Zuber says the moon is the Earth's closest relative. "If you think about the people that you know and love, it is not what they look like,...

A note at the end of Harrison H. Schmitt's July 30 letter said that he was "the last man to set foot on the moon as Apollo 17's geologist. " More precisely, Schmitt was the last of 12 men over three-plus years to come out of the lunar module and walk on the moon. But Eugene Cernan, his commander, was the last to climb back up the ladder to the Challenger lunar module, presumably making him the last man on the moon's soil before they departed. Cernan also was the last to communicate with Earth from the moon, saying, "As we leave the moon at...

NASA officials are exploring the moon for the first time in almost a decade, thanks to a computer system manufactured in Manassas. BAE Systems' computer motherboard is aboard the two robotic spacecraft NASA launched into orbit June 18. The unmanned spacecraft are on a mission to find places on the moon's surface where humans could land and stay for an extended time. "It's not a question of 'Is there a safe place to land?'; it's more looking at potential sites and deciding which is best to go back to," said Craig Tooley, project manager of...

RALEIGH, N.C. — Friendly fire felled Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson under a full moon in the thick of the northern Virginia wilderness during the Civil War. Ever since, debate has waxed and waned much like the moon over whether his fighters carelessly shot the legendary Confederate under a bright night sky — or mistook him for an approaching enemy. Now an astronomer on the 150th anniversary of Jackson's death has reported in the May issue of "Sky & Telescope" magazine that some...

Netflix's new "Hemlock Grove" is just the latest in a long line of campy efforts to see if werewolves can compete with vampires. All that back hair would seem to put them at a distinct disadvantage to the sexy fiends from Transylvania, but everybody keeps trying to teach the old dogs new tricks. In 2008, Toby Barlow snapped the leash and wrote his " Sharp Teeth " in free verse. Two years ago, Glen Duncan promised us " The Last Werewolf ," but it wasn't. Just last year,...

Contemplate a crowded sky at dusk in the west-northwest toward the end of May. Like Ocean City sunbathers, Jupiter , Venus and Mercury jam-pack the sundown heavens for Memorial Day weekend. In the present, Jupiter commands our western evening heavens. You can't miss Jupiter since it is a negative 1.9 magnitude (very bright), and you'll spy it from the urban parts of the metro area. On May 11, a youthful sliver of a moon hangs under the bright Jupiter, but by the next night, the waxing...

The next giant leap in space exploration may be a short hop on a small space rock. Next week, President Obama will request $105 million in NASA's 2014 budget for a mission that would capture a small asteroid, tug it near the moon, and later send astronauts to study it and grab samples. The asteroid-capturing robot could launch as soon as 2017, with astronauts flying to meet it near the moon by 2021, according to a NASA briefing presented to Congress last week. The...

Saturn and Jupiter stride up to the cosmic home plate in April and deliver runs of fun with a fabulous, fleet moon . At the start of April, the ringed planet Saturn rises in the east-southeastern sky before 10 p.m., and by the middle of the month it ascends an hour earlier. This plump gaseous planet appears to us at zero magnitude, which is bright enough to see in Washington's light-polluted night heavens. By the end of April — specifically on April 28 — Saturn rises in the east exactly when the sun ...

The name Environmental Film Festival doesn't do justice to the breadth of this 21st annual expo, which begins Tuesday and runs through March 24. The festival isn't so much a spotlight of eco-friendly films — although there are some of those — as it is a look at dramas, documentaries, remastered classics, animation and shorts that sometimes tangentially relate to nature. This year there are 190 films on the menu, many of them free, showing at 75 venues across the city. Most include a pre- or...

The future, as depicted in "Moon," is familiar. Televisions are turned on and off by clapping. Sentient computers use emoticons to convey feeling. And big corporations cut corners at the expense of their employees. This is the reality of Sam Bell, an employee of Lunar Industries Ltd., which has stationed him on the moon to oversee the mining of clean energy from moon rocks. He has been there for three years, beaming power back to Earth. There are only two weeks before Sam's contract is up. Only two weeks before he gets to see his wife and...

WASHINGTON -- NASA's great lunar fireworks finale fizzled. After gearing up for the space agency's much-hyped mission to hurl two spacecraft into the moon, the public turned away from the sky Friday anything but dazzled. Photos and video of the impact showed little more than a fuzzy white flash. In social media and live television coverage, many people were disappointed at the lack of spectacle. One person even joked that someone hit the pause button in mission control. Yet scientists involved in the project were downright...

A meat cleaver hangs over the federal government, but the unflappable men and women of the House majority remain cool and poised. With just four days left to stop automatic spending cuts from affecting everything from air travel to food inspections, House Republicans had but one item on their agenda Monday: renaming a NASA facility in California. H.R. 667, as this urgently needed legislation is known, would "redesignate the Dryden Flight Research Center as the Neil A. Armstrong Flight Research Center.