Being Earth's nearest neighbor and the only natural satellite, it has fascinated and inspired mankind over generations, with its enchanting illumination of the night sky. From the story of the Moon rabbit in East Asian folklore, to images of huge craters on the Moon at NASA's mission control, the ‘lamp of the night sky' has been marveled at and has opened the door to interesting space mysteries about the origin of the universe and extraterrestrial life outside planet Earth. So what has the pricey, and as some say, extravagant, space explorations of the Moon brought back to us and what more do we have to learn? According to some scientists, the current information we possess of the Moon is not very sufficient.
Hence, future plans of a lunar settlement and observation laboratory, like the one in Antarctica, have been proposed. This review discusses about the current available data of the Moon and the techniques used to study them. Furthermore, it focuses on the future research to be carried out on the Moon and how available data and equipment can be modified to find facts to solve the ‘lunar mysteries' that have troubled intellectual thinkers for centuries.
[...] To make things cheaper and efficient, space tourism could also rely on using solar power in space to fuel the flight to the moon rather than rockets and shuttles from Earth (Collins 2004). In parallel with tourism, the rights of the lunar industrialist must also be taken into consideration. A lunar mining industry could be a new prospect in future moon ventures. For instance, the mining of helium-3 is seen as one of the most lucrative potential outputs of extraterrestrial mining, as it can be used in nuclear fusion reactors, which are yet to be developed on Earth. [...]
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[...] D., & Huntress Jr, W. T. (2006). Proposal for an International lunar decade. In 36th COSPAR Scientific Assembly (Vol p. 105). Kopeikin, S. M., Pavlis, E., Pavlis, D., Brumberg, V. A., Escapa, A., Getino, J & Petrova, N. (2008). Prospects in the orbital and rotational dynamics of the Moon with the advent of sub-centimeter lunar laser ranging. Advances in Space Research, 1378-1390. de Melo, C. F., Winter, O. C., & Vieira Neto, E. [...]
[...] Data from this method is very powerful and when it is combined with other datasets, a detailed description of the lunar surface can be obtained (Dunkin & Heather 2000). Future research to increase knowledge of the moon and solve ‘lunar mysteries' The future of lunar exploration is very promising with different projects being put forward by various intellectuals. Some of them even have plans of using the Moon as ‘Earth's toxic waste dump' by disposing toxic materials and nuclear wastes in order to help preserve Earth's environment as suggested by Bainbridge (2009). Since former US President George W. [...]
[...] On manned Apollo missions, the return vehicle took photographic images, geophysical and spectral observations and dimensions of the Moon from its orbit. One of the most remarkable discoveries of the Apollo orbital data was that the Moon's center of mass was offset from the center of figure by approximately 2.5 km. The exact causes for this are still being debated, but scientists say that it is due to differences in crustal thickness and density (Neal, 2009). Meanwhile, the Clementine and Prospector programs provided clear evidence that water deposits in the form of ice exists in the permanently shadowed regions (PSR) near the south and north lunar poles. [...]
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