Lunar Lava Tubes Could Offer Future Moon Explorers a Safe Haven

A Radiation Safety Analysis for Lunar Lava Tubes

A Future Moon Mission: the Lunar Seismic Network

Introduction: The New Views of the Moon initiative has integrated remotely sensed and sample data in its approach to synthesizing lunar research over the last 30+ years. This integration has clearly demonstrated what we know and, maybe more importantly, what we don t know about the Moon. Most significantly, it has helped to formulate fundamental scientific questions about the Moon that still ne...

A Celestial Assisted INS Initialization Method for Lunar Explorers

The second and third phases of the Chinese Lunar Exploration Program (CLEP) are planning to achieve Moon landing, surface exploration and automated sample return. In these missions, the inertial navigation system (INS) and celestial navigation system (CNS) are two indispensable autonomous navigation systems which can compensate for limitations in the ground based navigation system. The accurate...

Multi-robot Mapping of Lava Tubes

Terrestrial planetary bodies such as Mars and the Moon are known to harbor volcanic terrain with enclosed lava tube conduits and caves. The shielding from cosmic radiation that they provide makes them a potentially hospitable habitat for life. This motivates the need to explore such lava tubes and assess their potential as locations for future human outposts. Such exploration will likely be con...

Colonic Crypts: Safe Haven from Microbial Products

The notion that the colon's deep crypt pockets provide a protected location that shields stem cells from potentially toxic substances is widely accepted. In this issue of Cell, Kaiko et al. reveal how a metabolite abundantly produced by the gut microbiota can inhibit stem cell proliferation but is blocked from doing so by crypt architecture.