Last week there were some exciting announcements from NASA about human exploration of the Moon. If all goes well the US may return an astronaut to the Moon’s surface sometime in 2027. That’s well in advance of China’s intention of putting people on the Moon in 2030. As in the 1960s, human space exploration seems…

How did the Moon form? It still remains something of a mystery. Now, a recent paper published in Nature Geoscience has given a new spin to this old debate. Back at the start of this century it all seemed sorted. Everyone agreed, or nearly everyone anyway, that our Moon was formed when the proto-Earth was…

  To the outside world science can seem to be full of unanswered questions. “More research needed” are the usual last words on a host of unsolved mysteries. So sometimes it’s great to have a few certainties, like for example, well, how the Moon was formed. Of course it was all down to a Mars-sized planet…

  Figure skating is, of course, the best known example of angular momentum at work. A spinning skater rotates more slowly as they extend their arms and more rapidly as they bring their arms closer in. It works the same way for the Earth-Moon system. Now here is the important question: has the angular momentum…