* Astronomy

Blobrana · L

RE: Moon soil

Blobrana · L

Tiny lightning bolt explosions can vaporise the moon's thin soil

Mini-lightning may flash in the coldest craters on the moon, melting and vapourising soil. All that sparking could have altered the surface as much as impacts from incoming rocks and dust.
We already knew that impacts stir up the fine layer of dust and ground rock that covers the lunar surface. But now Andrew Jordan at the University of New Hampshire in Durham and his colleagues suggest we keep an eye out for another cause: electrical sparks.
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Blobrana · L

'Shrapnel' risk to future Moon surface missions

The "shrapnel" generated by small space rocks that periodically hit the Moon may pose a larger risk to lunar missions than was previously believed.
A number of countries and private consortia have stated their plans to send robotic and crewed missions to the lunar surface in the coming decades.
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Blobrana · L

Melvin Calvin's Moon Dust Reappears After 44 Years

When Apollo 11 returned from its historic flight in 1969, the moon rocks and lunar soil collected by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin eventually found their way to some 150 laboratories worldwide. One of those was the Space Sciences Laboratory in Latimer Hall on the UC Berkeley campus. After experiments were conducted and papers published, those samples should have been sent back to NASA. Instead they wound up in storage, where they sat collecting dust until they were discovered more than four decades later.
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Blobrana · L

Lunar Dust

Blobrana · L

RE: Moon soil

Blobrana · L

Lunar Regolith

Blobrana · L

RE: Moon soil

Blobrana · L

Moon's interior water casts doubt on formation theory

An analysis of sediments brought back by the Apollo 17 mission has shown that the Moon's interior holds far more water than previously thought.
The analysis, reported in Science, has looked at pockets of volcanic material locked within tiny glass beads.
It found 100 times more water in the beads than has been measured before, and suggests that the Moon once held a Caribbean Sea-sized volume of water.
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Blobrana · L

NASA-Funded Scientists Make Lunar Watershed Discovery

A team of NASA-funded researchers has measured for the first time water from the moon in the form of tiny globules of molten rock, which have turned to glass-like material trapped within crystals. Data from these newly-discovered lunar melt inclusions indicate the water content of lunar magma is 100 times higher than previous studies suggested.
The inclusions were found in lunar sample 74220, the famous high-titanium "orange glass soil" of volcanic origin collected during the Apollo 17 mission in 1972. The scientific team used a state-of-the-art ion microprobe instrument to measure the water content of the inclusions, which were formed during explosive eruptions on the moon approximately 3.7 billion years ago.
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