Back to the Moon

Reported February 2006

ORLANDO, Fla. (Ivanhoe Broadcast News) -- The moon's surface hasn't been stepped on since the Apollo missions in the 1970's. Now, for the first time in more than 30 years, NASA is going back to the moon.

When the last astronaut took the final step on the moon, many people thought we'd never visit it again. Jim Garvin, Ph.D., a planetary scientist at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., says, "We went. We came. We saw. We conquered ... And we left."

Now, planetary scientists are going back, but this time through the eyes of the Hubble telescope. Brand new images show a side of our moon we've never seen.

"This is the first time we've looked at the moon with Hubble's spectacular vision to understand things about the moon that today we haven't fully understood. This is why exploration's so exciting," Garvin says.

The amazing pictures were captured using ultra-violet light reflected off the moon's surface. They reveal signs of oxygen-rich soils that scientists believe can be used to power rockets and be a source of oxygen to breathe for future life on the moon.

Garvin says, "So, finding resources, learning where they are, and how much there are, and learning then how to use them for people and utilization of human beings on the moon -- women and men -- is really our long-term goal."

A goal that may seem like light years away -- but thanks to these helpful images, living on the moon may be a closer reality. "We're going to learn to live there, we're going to learn to put human exploration and robot exploration together," Garvin says.

The Hubble telescope is normally meant to look at objects light years away, and researchers found focusing Hubble on the moon -- a mere 250,000 miles away -- was more challenging than expected.

Click here to Go Inside This Science or contact:

Goddard Space Flight Center
Greenbelt, MD 20770
(301)286-3979
http://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/home/index.html

For more information on astronomy:

American Astronomical Society
2000 Florida Ave., NW Suite 400
Washington, DC 20009-1231
(202) 328-2010
aas@aas.org
http://www.aas.org

Space Telescope Science Institute
3700 San Martin Drive
Baltimore, MD 21218
(410) 338-4700
help@stsci.edu

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