Data from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) have led scientists to conclude that the Moon is home to around 200 “melthouses” that offer stable, favorable temperatures for humans.
The pits “always hover around a comfortable 63F/17C,” NASA said Wednesday.
A constant 17C is in marked contrast to the rest of the Moon service, which fluctuates between 127C/260F and -173C/-280F over a full lunar day.
Coping with these temperatures greatly complicates lunar exploration, for machines and humans.
Therefore, the Moon’s warm spots are hot properties.
“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 the researchers who publish information about the pits in the journal Geophysical Research. letters
The paper’s three authors, UCLA planetary science professor David Paige, University of Colorado Boulder’s Paul Hayne, and UCLA researcher Tyler Horvath, used data from The Diviner instrument aboard the LRO , which had monitored temperatures on the lunar surface for more than 11 years. years.
The researchers focused on a mostly cylindrical pit inside Mare Tranquillitatis, the same region visited by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin in 1969, because its thermal environment was more hospitable than anywhere else on the lunar surface.
The group ran time-dependent 2D and 3D models using the data to understand the geometry and heat transfer that could lead to elevated temperatures.
The researchers concluded that the temperature inside the pit was not only a comfortable temperature, but that it was very possibly connected to a cave that would also have a similar stable environment.
The Mare Tranquillitatis pit crater. Image: NASA/Goddard/Arizona State University. Click to enlarge.
“If a cave extended from such a pit, it would also maintain this comfortable temperature throughout its length, which would vary by less than 1°C over an entire lunar day,” wrote the researchers, who posited the pit hypothesis and others like it. created by the roof of a collapsed cave.
“For long-term lunar colonization and exploration, pits may provide a desirable habitat: they are largely free from the constant threats of harmful radiation, impacts, and extreme temperatures,” the researchers wrote. “Thus, pits and caves may offer greater mission security than other potential base station sites, providing a valuable step toward sustaining human life beyond Earth.”
Better still, the boffins have detected many pits on the edge of the Moon, a location that offers the opportunity for direct communications to Earth.
NASA is returning to the Moon with commercial and international partners to expand scientific knowledge and expand the human presence in space.
The space agency’s Artemis program aims to bring humans to the lunar south pole by 2025 in the first manned lunar landing since Apollo 17 in 1972. ®