Sources: National Geographic
Firefly Aerospace successfully lands the Blue Ghost Mission 1 on the Moon as part of NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services program, delivering payloads to Mare Crisium with instruments to study lunar regoliths and the interactions between solar wind and Earth's magnetic field. 2025-03-2
NASA's "Orion" spacecraft performs a flyby of the Moon, coming within 130 km of the lunar surface before entering into a lunar orbit. 2022-11-21
NASA confirms water has been spotted on the sunlit surface of the moon. 2020-10-26
NASA officially selects SpaceX, Blue Origin and Dynetics to build its next-generation lunar lander to carry American astronauts to the Moon by 2024. 2020-04-30
U.S. President Donald Trump signs the "Space Policy Directive 1" that establishes the foundation for a crewed mission to the Moon, while also maintaining a longer-term NASA goal of landing a man on Mars. 2017-12-11
As predicted by NASA, the Apollo-group-type asteroid 2012 TC4 (approximately 15 m in diameter) passes a distance of 0.0003352 AU mi from Earth, well within the Moon's orbit. 2017-10-12
NASA publishes LRO images of the two craters on the Moon, where twin GRAIL probes ended their gravity-mapping mission in December 2012. 2013-03-19
NASA scientists beam a picture of Leonardo da Vinci's masterpiece, the "Mona Lisa", to Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, a spacecraft orbiting the Moon, marking a first in laser communication. 2013-01-18
NASA's twin GRAIL spacecraft crash into a mile-high cliff near the Lunar North Pole to close out a successful mission to map the Moon's gravity field with unprecedented precision. 2012-12-17
NASA succeeds in putting the first of two Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory satellites in orbit around the moon. 2011-12-31