From the Moon's "atmosphere" to the fact that it is shrinking, here are five essential facts about the natural satellite that dominates our night sky.
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NASA engineers are performing maintenance on the Space Launch System rocket while it is still at Launch Pad 39B at the Kennedy Space Center, following two failed attempts to launch the Artemis 1 mission to the Moon. While the American space agency works on its mission to return humans to the Moon after 50 years, here are five interesting facts about Earth's lone natural satellite that you may not have known.
Facts About Moon
The Moon has an ‘atmosphere’
While conventional wisdom holds that the Moon has no atmosphere and thus no gases on its surface, this is not entirely correct. During the Apollo 17 mission, NASA launched the Lunar Atmospheric Composition Experiment (LACE) instrument to the Moon. LACE assisted scientists in discovering that the planet contains a limited number of atoms and molecules, including helium, argon, neon, ammonia, methane, and carbon dioxide.
However, because this is such a thin layer of gases, it cannot be called an atmosphere; rather, the more accurate term would be "exosphere." Unlike Earth's dense atmosphere, where collisions between gas molecules dominate motion, the moon's exosphere is so thin that atoms and molecules almost never collide.
Instead, gas molecules on the moon follow arcing paths determined by the gravity of the Moon and the processes that created the molecules.
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Chemical reactions between solar wind and lunar surface material, the release of material from comet and meteoroid impacts, and "out-gassing" from the Moon's interior are all possible sources of gases on the satellite. These processes may also provide the energy that drives gas molecule motion.
The Moon is shrinking and that causes moonquakes
The Moon continues to shrink as its interior cools. In fact, NASA estimates that its diameter has shrunk by more than 50 metres over the last few hundred million years. And, just as a grape begins to wrinkle as it shrinks down into a raising, the Moon begins to wrinkle as well. However, unlike a grape, the Moon's surface is rigid and brittle.
This means that the shrinking causes "thrust faults," in which one section of the crust is pushed up over another.
NASA analysis revealed that these faults are active and are likely causing moonquakes, some of which are quite strong, measuring around five on the Richter scale. When viewed from the lunar surface, these fault lines can resemble small stair-step-shaped cliffs. These can be tens of metres tall and can stretch for several kilometres.
The twelve moonwalkers
12 astronauts walked on the moon's surface between 1969 and 1972. Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, Charles Conrad, Alan Bean, Alan Shepard, Edgar Mitchell, David Scott, James Irwin, John Young, Charles Duke, Eugene Cernan, and Harrison Schmitt are among those who have participated. The Apollo astronauts returned 382 kilogrammes of lunar rocks and soil, which scientists are still studying.
Lunar resources
While the lunar landscape may appear to be an empty desert, scientists believe it contains numerous valuable resources that can be harvested for "in-situ" use during space missions. Hydrogen, which can be used to propel rockets, water ice, which can be split into hydrogen and oxygen for fuel, and helium-3, a non-radioactive helium isotope that could potentially be used to provide nuclear energy in the future, are examples of these.
These resources are one of the reasons that China and the United States are competing for dominance on the Moon and in outer space. Indeed, following the discovery of a mineral known as Changesite-(Y), China's national space administration has approved plans for three future unmanned missions to the Moon. Helium-3 is thought to be present at Changesite-(Y).
Two-faced
The only natural satellite of our planet takes the same amount of time to revolve around the Earth as it does to rotate on its axis. As a result, we can only see one side of the Moon, known as the near side. The far side will always be turned away from us. China became the first country to land a spacecraft on the Moon's far side in 2019.
The Moon's "two-faced" nature causes wildly varying temperatures across its surface. While the sunny side of the Moon can reach temperatures of 123 degrees Celsius, the permanently shadowed polar craters can reach temperatures of minus 233 degrees Celsius.