Scientists have discovered a cave on the moon for the first time. With a depth of at least 100 meters, this could be an ideal place to build a permanent base for humans.
Future astronauts will need extensive protection against space radiation and unpredictable temperature variations on the Moon if they want to stay long. Thus, it is preferable to have natural formations that ensure this.
Lorenzo Bruzzone and Leonardo Carrer of the University of Trento in Italy discovered the cave by using radar to penetrate a hole in a rocky plain called Mare Tranquillitatis.
“The Existence of an Underground Channel”
“In 2010, as part of NASA’s Luna Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) mission, the Miniature Radio-Frequency (Mini-RF) instrument obtained data that included a pit in Mare Tranquilitatis,” said Professor
“Years later, we reanalyzed this data using complex signal processing techniques that we had recently developed and discovered radar reflections from the pit area that are best explained by the existence of an underground channel. This discovery provides the first direct evidence of an accessible lava tube beneath the surface of the Moon.”
The first evidence of an accessible lava tube beneath the surface of the Moon
The pit studied by Bruzzone and his colleagues, known as the Mare Tranquillitatis pit, is one of more than 200 that have been observed. Some or all of these appear to be the result of the collapse of the ceiling of a lava tube. However, just because such a pit exists does not mean that there is an underground cave large enough to be useful, he writes IFLScience.
The Tranquillitatis Great Pit is the deepest known, so it seemed like a good place to start. It has a diameter of about 100 meters and walls so steep that they can even overlap.
The new study reveals a bright spot on the western side of the pit. Simulations suggest it is a pipe between 30 and 80 meters long and about 45 meters wide. Maybe not big enough to host a city, but a decent location for a lunar village.
The floor of the cave is believed to be flat enough to be usable. Although it is more than 100 meters from the cave entrance to the surface, under the conditions of low lunar gravity, this could not be a major impediment.
These caves have been theorized for over 50 years
The authors constructed two models of the likely dimensions of the pit and cave, which differ primarily in the height of the pile of rocks produced when the pit’s roof collapsed, and thus the steep slope of the floor.
But the zone lacks the other essential ingredient for living on the Moon: ice. Frozen water almost certainly exists at the lunar poles, especially at the south pole.
Ice anywhere near the surface of the flat equatorial plane that is Mare Tranquilitatis would have long since boiled away during the hot days of the Moon.
However, the work increases the chances that such lava tubes can exist at the poles and, perhaps more importantly, that we can find them from space with modestly increased resolution. “These caves have been theorized for over 50 years, but this is the first time we have demonstrated their existence,” Bruzzone said.
The study is published in Nature Astronomy.
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Source: www.descopera.ro
