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by Laura Dobberstein
27 July 2022
from
TheRegister Website
Image
NASA
NASA's
Lunar Orbiter
spots
comfortably warm 'pits'
all over the
Moon.
Shaded bits of lava tubes
stay at 17°C all
lunar day and all lunar night,
a contrast with
the rest of
Luna's frequent
fluctuations...
Shaded bits of lava tubes stay at 17°C all lunar day and all lunar
night, a contrast with the rest of Luna's frequent fluctuations
Data from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO)
has led scientists to conclude that the Moon hosts around 200 "pits"
that offer stable and human-friendly temperatures.
The pits
"always hover around
a comfortable 63ºF/17ºC," NASA stated on Wednesday.
A steady 17ºC contrasts
markedly with the rest of the Moon's surface, which fluctuates
between 127ºC/260ºF to -173ºC/-280ºF across a full Lunar day.
Coping with those temperatures vastly complicates lunar exploration,
for machines and humans.
Warm spots on the Moon are therefore hot property.
"Since the discovery
of pits on the Moon by
JAXA's SELENE spacecraft in
2009, there has been interest in whether they provide access to
caves that could be explored by rovers and astronauts," wrote
researchers who published information on the pits in the journal
Geophysical Research Letters.
The paper's three
authors,
-
UCLA professor of
planetary science David Paige
-
Paul Hayne of the
University of Colorado Boulder
-
UCLA researcher
Tyler Horvath,
...used data from The
Diviner instrument onboard the LRO, which had monitored temps on
the lunar surface for more than 11 years.
The researchers focused on a mostly cylindrical pit inside Mare
Tranquillitatis, the same region visited by
Neil Armstrong
and Buzz Aldrin in
1969, as its thermal environment was more hospitable than any other
place on the lunar surface.
The group ran time-dependent 2-D and 3-D models using the data to
understand the geometry and heat transfer that could lead to the
elevated temperatures.
The researchers concluded that the temperature inside the pit was
not only a comfortable temperature, it was very possibly attached to
a cave that would also have a similar stable environment.
"If a cave extends
from a pit such as this, it too would maintain this comfortable
temperature throughout its length, varying by less than 1°C over
an entire lunar day," wrote the researchers, who hypothesized
the pit and others like it were created by the ceiling of a
collapsed cave.
"For long term colonization and exploration of the Moon, pits
may provide a desirable habitat:
they are largely
free from the constant threats of harmful radiation,
impacts, and extreme temperatures," wrote the researchers.
"Thus, pits and caves
may offer greater mission safety than other potential base
station locales, providing a valuable stepping stone for
sustaining human life beyond Earth."
Better still, the
boffins have spotted many pits
on the Moon's nearside, a location that offers the chance for
direct-to-Earth communications.
NASA is returning to the Moon with commercial and international
partners to both further scientific knowledge and expand human
presence in space.
The space org's
Artemis program aims to take humans
to the lunar south pole by 2025 in the first crewed lunar landing
since 1972's Apollo 17.
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