Now that the August 2009 issue of Astronomy is in the mail or already in hand, we’ve updated Astronomy.com with our newest web extras to give subscribers exclusive complementary information to this special issue about our return to the Moon. Take a sneak peek inside the August 2009 Astronomy magazine . If you subscribe to Astronomy , make sure you’re registered with Astronomy.com so you can access these great extras. Here are this issue's highlights...

If all goes as planned, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) will launch from Cape Canaveral either Thursday or Friday, depending on the launch of space shuttle Endeavour. Brown University professor and LRO researcher Michael Wyatt is at the launch site, and starting today, Wyatt will share his impressions of this historic mission — the opening maneuver in the United States return to the Moon — with all of you. Thanks, Michael! We'll post Michael's...

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Mars Exploration Program web site has a fun new feature — Ask Dr. C, “your personal Mars expert.” You can type in a simple question — the simpler, the better — and get a pretty good answer. A computer program tries to match your question with an extensive database of responses. The real Dr. C is Phil Christensen , a planetary scientist at Arizona State University. Christensen is the Principal Investigator for the 2001...

Thanks to painstaking observations and computer modeling, astronomers have discovered that the Milky Way Galaxy is littered with the debris of stellar cannibalism. Small galaxies unlucky enough to be captured by our powerful gravity get torn to shreds and consumed. It’s sometimes hard to sort out our galaxy’s complex history because we are buried in the midst of it — an astronomical “can’t see the forest through the trees” dilemma. So astronomers...

***Images updated.*** Next week, you can check out the rich collection of astronomical instruments at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago. In celebration of the 400th anniversary of the telescope, the planetarium opens its a new exhibition, “Telescopes: Through the Looking Glass,” on May 22. The show spotlights technology used to gather information about our universe since Galileo’s day and includes hands-on interactive exhibits. The trumpet-shaped telescope...

On May 15, the SETI Institute — the planet’s leading extraterrestrial searchers — launched “ Earth Speaks .” The project invites the public to submit proposed messages to alien civilizations. According to Thomas Pierson, CEO of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, “By submitting text messages, pictures, and sounds from across the globe, people from all walks of life will contribute to a dialogue about what humanity might say to intelligent...

On April 25, Steve Eves of Ohio launched the largest model rocket in history : a 1,700-pound, 36-foot-high replica of the legendary Saturn V booster that took the first astronauts to the Moon. It rose to about 4,400 feet, deployed chutes, and settled to the ground — upright. Check out this YouTube video . Listen to that thing roar! Model rocketeer and Fresno, California, lawyer Mark Canepa provided the photos. Check out his outstanding pre-launch...

Here is what the future of computer-simulated galaxy mergers may look like. This image to the right — unusual for its vivid color and detail — shows five stages of a collision between two virtual galaxies, cooked up by computer programs that simulate the processes at work. View a bigger version of this image . The image is part of an ongoing project to visualize simulated mergers in a more realistic manner — to produce something more like what you...

Tuesday at the European Week of Astronomy and Space Science meeting in Hatfield, England, astronomers announced a new milestone: an extrasolar planet with the lowest confirmed mass of any yet discovered around a normal star . “Confirmed” . . . “normal star” . . . seems like a lot of caveats, doesn’t it? Let me explain. The planet is called Gliese 581 e, and the research says it contains 1.9 times Earth’s mass. Earth-mass planets are the holy grails...

Astronomers eagerly anticipate the final Hubble Space Telescope (HST) servicing mission, set to blast off May 12 from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. And they are already hard at work designing the observatory that will take over after Hubble sees its final light. Hubble is, in the lingo of telescope engineering, a UVOIR instrument: Its 2.4-meter light-collecting mirror samples wavelengths of light in the ultraviolet (UV), optical (O)...