Watching this video was the best 20 minutes of my day.

Bill Stone, the maverick cave explorer who invented robots and dive equipment that have allowed him to plumb Earth's deepest abysses, explains his efforts to build a robot to explore Jupiter's moon Europa. The plan is to send the machine to bore through miles of ice and swim through a liquid underworld that may harbor alien life. And if that's not enough, he's also planning to mine lunar ice by 2015.

AFP reports that India has installed a pair of giant antennas to monitor a planned robotic mission to the moon.

"The deep space network at Byalalu, 45 kilometres (30 miles) from Bangalore, will keep track of the Chandrayaan-1 lunar mission and provide command support during its two-year orbit around the moon, India's space agency said.

[MSNBC - 30.07.2007]
Changes in the brightness and color over small areas of the moon's surface, known as Transient Lunar Phenomena have been observed telescopically for hundreds of years.

The optical flashes have been seen by skywatchers but rarely photographed.

"People over the years have attributed TLPs to all sorts of effects: turbulence in Earth's atmosphere, visual physiological effects, atmospheric smearing of light like a prism, and even psychological effects like hysteria or planted suggestion," said Columbia University researcher Arlin Crotts.

Here's an image from the Astronomy Picture of the Day showing the Moon and Venus.

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap070523.html

"The two brightest objects in the night sky appeared to go right past each other last week. On the night of May 19, Earth's Moon and the planet Venus were visible in the same part of the sky, and at closest approach were less than one degree apart.

Just in case you missed it, here is a great collection of images from the recent lunar eclipse! Many of the images are absolutely amazing!

Take a look here: http://www.flickr.com/groups/loony/pool/

-Matt

The new website for the Lunar Explorers Society is currently under construction.

We are working as hard as we can in order to bring you a top quality site that includes many new features.

This section will contain the latest breaking news from the space industry, agencies and academia.

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-Matt and Trond