People can live and work in lunar caves and craters with constant temperatures in the 60s – ScienceDaily

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Future human explorers on the Moon may have 99 problems, but staying warm or cool won’t be one. A team led by planetary scientists at the University of California, Los Angeles, has discovered shaded locations inside craters on the Moon that always hover around a comfortable temperature of 63 degrees Fahrenheit.

The craters and caverns that base camps might lead to would make it safer and more thermally stable for lunar exploration and long-term habitation than the rest of the moon’s surface, which gets as hot as 260 degrees during the day and drops as low as 280. Below zero at night.

Craters were first discovered on the moon in 2009, and since then, scientists have wondered if they led to caves that could be explored or used as shelters. About 16 of the more than 200 craters are probably collapsed lava tubes, said Tyler Horvath, a doctoral student at UCLA who led the new research. Two of the most prominent craters have visible cavities that clearly lead to a type of cave or void, and there is strong evidence that another hiatus may also lead to a large cave.

Lava tubes, also found on Earth, form when molten lava flows under a field of cooling lava or a crust forms over a river of lava, leaving a long, hollow tunnel. If the roof of a solid lava tube collapses, it opens a hole that could lead to the rest of the cave-like tube.

Horvath processed images from the Diviner Lunar Radiometer Experiment — a thermal camera and one of six instruments on NASA’s Robotic Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter — to see if the temperature inside the craters differed from that at the surface.

Focusing on a cylindrical depression roughly 100 meters deep about the length and width of a football field in a region of the Moon known as Mare Tranquillitatis, Horvath and colleagues used computer modeling to analyze the thermal properties of lunar rocks and dust and to plot crater temperatures over a period of time.

The results were recently published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, revealed that temperatures within the permanently shaded reaches of the crater fluctuate only slightly throughout the lunar day, remaining at around 63 degrees. If the cave extended from the bottom of the crater, as the images taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter camera indicate, that temperature would also be relatively comfortable.

The research team, which also included UCLA professors of planetary sciences David Page and Paul Hein of the University of Colorado Boulder, believes that the drooping shadow is responsible for the constant temperature, limiting the temperature of objects during the day and preventing heat from radiating away at night. Meanwhile, the sunny part of the crater floor reaches daytime temperatures close to 300 degrees, about 40 degrees higher than the lunar surface.

“Because Tranquillitatis crater is closest to the lunar equator, the luminous Earth at noon is probably the hottest place on the entire moon,” Horvath said.

A day on the Moon lasts approximately 15 Earth days, during which time the surface is constantly bombarded with sunlight and often hot enough to boil water. Unimaginably cold nights last about 15 Earth days. The invention of heating and cooling equipment that can operate under these conditions and produce enough power to run non-stop could prove to be an insurmountable barrier to lunar exploration or habitation. Solar power – the most common form of power generation at NASA – doesn’t run at night, after all. (NASA currently has no plans to establish an exploration base camp or lodgings on the Moon.)

Building bases in the shaded parts of these craters allows scientists to focus on other challenges, such as growing food, providing oxygen to astronauts, gathering resources for experiments, and expanding the base. Craters or caves will also provide some protection from cosmic rays, solar radiation, and micro-meteorites.

“Humans evolved while living in caves, and we may go back to caves when we live on the moon,” said Page, who is leading the Diviner Lunar Radiometer experiment.

Diviner has been continuously mapping the Moon since 2009, producing NASA’s second largest planetary dataset and providing the most detailed and comprehensive thermal measurements of any object in our solar system, Earth included. The team’s current work on drilling the moon has improved the data from the Diviner’s experiment.

“Since no one else has seen these little things with the Diviner, we found that she had a bit of double vision, causing all of our maps to become a bit blurry,” Horvath said. The team worked to align many of the images taken by the instrument so that they could achieve an accurate thermal reading down to the individual pixel level. This process resulted in high-resolution maps of the lunar surface.

Data from the early stages of the Lunar Crater Thermal Modeling project was used to help develop the rover’s thermal management system for NASA’s proposed Moon Diver mission. Horvath and Heine were part of the science team for this mission, which aims to insert the rover into Tranquilites Crater to search for the layers of lava flows seen in its walls and to explore any existing cave.

Horvath and Page are members of the science team of a new lunar-associated thermal camera led by Paul Heine called L-CIRiS, which will head to the moon’s south pole in late 2023 to obtain the first geothermal images.

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