All articles starting with L
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Lunar mare basalt
Lunar mare basalt is the dark volcanic rock that fills the Moon's low-lying maria, plains early astronomers mistook for seas, erupted mostly between 3.8 and 3.2 billion years ago.
Lunar month
A lunar month, also called a Moon month or lunation, is the time from one New Moon to the next, averaging 29.53 days and forming the basis of lunar calendars.
Lunar New Year
Lunar New Year, the Spring Festival (春节)， Tết, or Seollal, is the new-year festival of East Asia's lunisolar calendars, starting on the first new moon of the lunar year, dated between January 21 and February 20, and celebrated by over a billion people.
Lunar orbit
A lunar orbit, also called a selenocentric orbit, is the path of a spacecraft around the Moon, first achieved by the Soviet Luna 10 in 1966.
Lunar Owls BC
Lunar Owls BC, a Miami-based Unrivaled 3-on-3 women's basketball club and Napheesa Collier's team, went 13-1 with the top 2025 seed, won the league's first game, and lost the semifinal to Vinyl BC.
Lunar Park
Lunar Park (るなぱあく, Maebashi Municipal Central Children's Playground) is a small municipal children's amusement park in Maebashi, Gunma, Japan, opened November 1, 1954; free admission, 50-yen rides, and two registered tangible cultural properties.
Lunar phase
A lunar phase, also called a moon phase, is one of the recurring apparent shapes of the Moon as seen from Earth, repeating every 29.5 days.
Lunar Polar Exploration Mission
The Lunar Polar Exploration Mission (LUPEX) is a joint ISRO and JAXA robotic mission to prospect for water ice at the lunar south pole, targeted for 2028.
Lunar Prospector
Lunar Prospector was a NASA Discovery Program orbiter that circled the Moon from 1998 to 1999, mapping its surface composition, gravity, and magnetic fields and searching for polar water ice.
Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter
The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter is a NASA robotic spacecraft, managed from Goddard Space Flight Center, that has orbited the Moon since June 2009 and is the longest-lived lunar mission ever flown.
Lunar regolith
Lunar regolith, or lunar soil, is the loose, fragmented material covering the Moon. It is generated by meteorite impacts on the bedrock, containing no organic matter but holding water molecules.
Lunar Remastered Collection
LUNAR Remastered Collection (Lunar Remastered Collection) is GungHo's 2025 compilation remastering Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete and Lunar 2: Eternal Blue Complete for Windows, Switch, PS4/5, and Xbox, with widescreen remastered mode, new dubs, and quality-of-life features.
Lunar resources
Lunar resources, also called Moon mining targets, are materials on the Moon usable for space activity, including polar water ice, regolith oxygen and metals, and helium-3; none are yet extracted.
Lunar rover
A lunar rover, or Moon rover, is a motorized vehicle for traveling across the Moon's surface. The Soviet Lunokhod 1 was first in 1970, followed by Apollo's crewed rovers in 1971.
Lunar Roving Vehicle
The Lunar Roving Vehicle, known as the Moon buggy, was a battery-powered, four-wheeled rover driven on the Moon during the Apollo 15, 16, and 17 missions in 1971 and 1972.
Lunar Society of Birmingham
The Lunar Society of Birmingham was an informal 1765-1813 dinner club of Enlightenment scientists and industrialists including Boulton, Watt, Darwin and Priestley, who met near the full moon; revived as a charity in 1990.
Lunar south pole
The lunar south pole is the Moon's southern rotational pole, a heavily cratered region never seen from Earth that holds water ice and is targeted by NASA's Artemis program.
Lunar Surface Innovation Consortium
The Lunar Surface Innovation Consortium is a NASA-funded collaboration established in 2020 and operated by the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory to develop technologies for a sustained presence on the Moon.
Lunar swirls
Lunar swirls are bright, sinuous albedo markings on the Moon, found in maria and highlands, always linked to magnetized crust; the type example is Reiner Gamma.
Lunar Terrain Vehicle
The Lunar Terrain Vehicle (LTV) is an unpressurized rover NASA is procuring from commercial providers to carry suited Artemis astronauts across the lunar south polar region.
Lunar theory
Lunar theory is the mathematical description of the Moon's motion around the Earth under the gravitation of the Earth and the Sun, serving for three centuries as the principal testing ground for perturbation theory.
Lunar Trailblazer
Lunar Trailblazer was a NASA small satellite mission to map the form and distribution of water on the Moon, launched February 26, 2025, but lost contact the next day.
Lunar water
Lunar water, also called water on the Moon, is water on or beneath the Moon's surface, including ice in permanently shadowed polar craters, confirmed by spacecraft since the 1990s.
Lunar-based Ultraviolet Telescope
The Lunar-based Ultraviolet Telescope (LUT), also called the Moon-based Ultraviolet Telescope, is a 15-centimeter near-ultraviolet telescope carried by China's Chang'e-3 lander, which began observing near Sinus Iridum in 2013.
Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete
Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete is a Saturn/PlayStation remake of the 1992 Sega CD RPG Lunar: The Silver Star, following Alex's Dragon Master quest, with positioning-based turn-based battles and Working Designs' liberal 1999 English localization.
LunAres Research Station
LunAres Research Station is a privately run space analog habitat in Piła, Poland, where crews of four to eight live in isolation to simulate Lunar or Martian missions.
Lunaria
Lunaria (honesty, money plant, silver dollar) is a European Brassicaceae genus with three species, L. annua, L. rediviva, and L. telekiana, known for silvery disc-like seed pods and erucic and nervonic acid rich seed oil.
Lunaria annua
Lunaria annua, honesty or annual honesty (money plant, silver dollar plant), is a biennial Brassicaceae herb native to south-central and southern Europe, grown for pink spring flowers and papery coin-like silicles used in dried arrangements.
Lunatic
Lunatic was a French hip-hop duo of rappers Booba and Ali from Boulogne-Billancourt, whose only album, Mauvais Œil (2000), is a classic of French rap.
Lunatic asylum
Lunatic asylum: the historic institution for confining and treating people judged insane, also called madhouse and later mental hospital; defined by legal detention, moral treatment at the York Retreat, the 1845 Lunacy Act, peak populations of about 150,000 in 1950s Britain, and twentieth-century closure under deinstitutionalization.