Nowadays, new lunar or planetary exploration missions including landers and rovers have been earnestly studied in Japan. Those missions will follow up a lunar global remote sensing mission Kaguya or a small body sample return mission Hayabusa. Space robotics technologies make a lot of important roles in order to achieve those missions. They will cover a pin-point landing technology, a reliable ...

This position paper reflects on why we want greater participation in the computing sciences, what ‘greater participation’ means and should mean, and on the particular characteristics of AI that recommend it as an enticement and way into computing. Primary tenets are that the need for and training of socially-engaged ‘computational thinkers’ (Wing, 2006) is the most important motivation for incr...

Lunar cycle-associated physiology has been found in a wide variety of organisms. Studies suggest the presence of a circalunar clock in some animals, but the location of the lunar clock is unclear. We previously found lunar-associated expression of transcripts for Cryptochrome3 gene (SgCry3) in the brain of a lunar phase-responsive fish, the Goldlined spinefoot (Siganus guttatus). Then we propos...

The initial studies of Apollo rock samples concluded that the Moon was an anhydrous planetary body [1]. Recently there has been a change of opinion with several research groups detecting copious amounts of water, up to 6050 ppm from a range of lunar glasses, melt inclusions and apatite [2-7]. Here we report results from insitu ion microprobe analysis of apatite grains from Apollo mare basalt 12...

The Visible Infrared Imager Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) is one of five instruments on-board the Suomi National Polarorbiting Partnership (NPP) satellite that launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif., on Oct. 28, 2011. VIIRS has been scheduled to view the Moon approximately monthly with a spacecraft roll maneuver after its NADIR door open on November 21, 2011. To reduce the uncertainty of th...

Introduction: One of the important outstanding goals of lunar science is understanding the bombardment history of the Moon and calibrating the impact flux curve for extrapolation to the Earth and other terrestrial planets. Obtaining a sample from a carefully-characterized interior melt sheet or a ring massif is a reliable way to tell a single crater's age. A different but complementary approach...