Roughly 40 years after they actually landed on the thing but who am I to judge?

Fuck that, I judge all the time. That’s not important now.

First off, the Moon-scope:

In the Moon’s weak gravity, it might be possible to build a telescope with a mirror as large as 50 meters across, half the length of a football field—big enough to analyze the chemistry on planets around other stars for signs of life.

That’s the dream of Peter C. Chen, astrophysicist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. And he wants to build it using lunar dust—because that might just be the most economical approach.

“If we lift all materials from Earth, we’re limited by what a rocket can carry to the Moon,” Chen explains. “But on the Moon, you’re absolutely surrounded by lunar dust”—a prized natural resource in the eyes of Chen, an expert in composite materials.

next up, Water on the Moon:

A new analysis of Apollo 15 moon rocks has for the first time uncovered water locked up inside.

It’s just a miniscule amount of the wet stuff — not enough to sustain even a lunar cactus or to power any hydrogen jetpacks — but the discovery does bolster hopes that there has always been water in moon rocks and perhaps some locked away as ice in the dark crannies of polar craters.

The discovery also overturns 40 years of studies which had failed to find the water and which led to the conclusion, drawn by most planetary scientists, that moon rocks must be all dry.

[…]

One of the ramifications of the newfound water is that it calls into question some of the details about the way the moon formed. The most popular current theory is that a Mars-sized body sideswiped Earth about 4.5 billion years ago, creating a ring of debris that eventually coalesced into the moon.

(via science@nasa, discovery news )