It's known that water ice exists below the lunar regolith (broken rock and dust), but scientists don't yet understand whether surface ice frost covers the floors inside these cold craters. To find out, NASA is sending Lunar Flashlight, a small satellite (or SmallSat) no larger than a briefcase. Swooping low over the lunar South Pole, it will use lasers to shed light on these dark craters—much like a prospector looking for hidden treasure by shining a flashlight into a cave.

NASA announced Friday the agency decided its Psyche mission will go forward, targeting a launch period opening on Oct. 10, 2023.

Earlier this year, Psyche missed its planned 2022 launch period as a result of mission development problems, leading to an internal review of whether the mission would be able to overcome these issues to successfully launch in 2023.

This continuation/termination review was informed by a project-proposed mission replan and a separate independent review, commissioned in June by NASA and the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, that investigated causes for the delay.

"I appreciate the hard work of the independent review board and the JPL-led team toward mission success," said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. "The lessons learned from Psyche will be implemented across our entire mission portfolio. I am excited about the science insights Psyche will provide during its lifetime and its promise to contribute to our understanding of our own planet's core.

Building up a lunar settlement has been the ultimate aim of lunar exploitation since humanity's first step on the moon. Yet, limited fuel and oxygen supplies restrict human survival on the moon.

Combining photovoltaic and electrocatalysis, the artificial production of hydrocarbon fuels along with oxygen using carbon dioxide and water as the feedstocks has been demonstrably feasible on the Earth and is recognized as a potential strategy to be imitated in extraterrestrial sites. With the rapid progress of moon exploration, researchers have discovered that the moon's surface has considerable carbon dioxide and water reserves, which further confirms the feasibility of the idea.

Against this background, the joint research team of the University of Science and Technology of China, Nanjing University and China Academy of Space Technology found that the lunar soil brought back by the Chang'e 5 mission can be used as a catalyst to drive the electrocatalytic CO₂ conversion for fuel and oxygen production.

The sun was in a good mood this week, or at least that's what it looked like in a photo published by NASA.

A photo of the sun taken from a NASA satellite and time-stamped Thursday morning appears to show a smile on the surface of our nearest star.

It's not the first time this week the cheerful pattern appeared.

"Today, NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory caught the sun 'smiling,'" NASA said in a Wednesday tweet. "Seen in ultraviolet light, these dark patches on the sun are known as coronal holes and are regions where fast solar wind gushes out into space."

According to SpaceWeather.com, the sun is spewing a triple stream of solar wind toward Earth. This could produce auroras here on Earth as early as Saturday, the website said.

The Solar Dynamics Observatory is a satellite that's in orbit around the Earth, with sensors pointed at the sun to take a variety of measurements of the sun and solar activity.

One of the mission's goals is to see how the sun's magnetic field is generated and structured, and how it impacts life on Earth and our telecommunications systems.