A Road Trip with Commander Chris

Happy Trails! Send me a postcard!

Exploring the Moon's Shadowy Craters With Nuclear-Powered Rovers April 15, 2026
Rovers equipped with Radioisotope Power Systems (RPSs), aka. nuclear reactors, could effectively explore the craters in the Moon's southern polar region.
The Incredible Shrinking Neutrino. April 14, 2026
They are the most abundant particles in the universe, yet we barely know they exist. Neutrinos stream through everything, through walls, through planets and even through you…. in their billions every second, leaving no trace. We've known for decades that they have mass, but pinning down exactly how much has defeated physicists for years. Now, […]
Reading the Moon’s Buried Past. April 14, 2026
The lunar south pole is where humanity plans to build its first permanent outpost but we still don't fully understand what lies beneath the surface. A new study has used radar to peer below the ground in one of the Moon's most complex and battered regions and what it's finding raises important questions about the […]
The Universe’s Most Powerful Telescope. April 14, 2026
When a massive star explodes on the far side of the universe, the light from that explosion normally fades long before it reaches us. But occasionally, the universe conspires to help. A newly discovered supernova has been caught using the gravity of an entire galaxy as a natural magnifying glass, boosting its light by at […]
The Zhamanshin Impact Event Was Likely Much More Destructive Than Thought April 14, 2026
Around 900,000 years ago, an impactor slammed into modern-day Kazakhstan and excavated a crater about 14 km in diameter. It was the most recent hypervelocity impactor powerful enough to trigger a nuclear winter, but not an exinction. New research suggests the crater is almost twice as large, showing that the energy released by the impact […]