Image: NASA EDGE
Image: NASA Ames/Dana Barry
The Minotaur V rocket (left) that will carry NASA’s LADEE awaits launch from Pad 0B at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility at Wallops Island, Va. An artist’s
concept (right) of the LADEE spacecraft orbiting the moon and preparing to fire its maneuvering thrusters to maintain a safe orbital altitude.
By Emory Stagmer
Did you know the moon has an
atmosphere?
I wouldn’t be surprised if you
didn’t. Until just a few years ago
nobody did. It’s not much. You
can’t breathe it. We think it’s mostly
dust. But we don’t know exactly
what’s in it or how it works. How
does an atmosphere operate when
the days are 28 earth days long?
That’s 14*24=336 hours of daylight
followed by 336 hours of night time.
How does an atmosphere work
when the gravity is 1/6 that of Earth?
How does an atmosphere work
when it’s bombarded by the sun’s
solar wind at a million miles an hour?
How does an atmosphere work
when the sunlit portion of the moon
is +120 degrees C (hot enough to
boil water) and the dark areas are
-170 degrees C (cold enough to
freeze air)? Those are the kinds of
questions NASA is trying to answer
with the LADEE satellite, the Lunar
Atmosphere and Dust Environment
Explorer.
Technically
the
atmosphere
on the moon is called a ‘surface
06
06
boundary exosphere’. “Surface
Boundary” means that it goes all
the way down to the surface. But
it’s a trillion times thinner than the
air we breathe here on Earth. It’s so
thin