NASA Mission Seeks Lunar Air

[Waspie_Dwarf]

ScienceCasts: NASA Mission Seeks Lunar Air

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A NASA spacecraft slated for launch in September will fly to the Moon to investigate the tenuous lunar atmosphere. Researchers hope "LADEE" will solve a mystery that has been puzzling them since the days of Apollo.

Source: NASA Science

[cacoseraph]

Trip out! 1/10,000,000,000,000th the density of earth's atmosphere isn't much, but it is still a heck of a lot greater than the zero I had always assumed.

I wonder how durable the atmosphere is... like, do the individual atoms and molecules stick around enough for it to very slowly be thickening or do they get ejected into space never to return around as fast as they are generated?

Cool stuff, thanks for the link

edit:

as for the rays of dawn, my first thought was actually dust from micrometeorite impact. with (*ahem* basically) no atmo the moon must have at least 100's, if not many, many more times the impacts as earth. mix that with the much lessened gravity and again, the lack of atmosphere and the ejecta could be way non-trivial.

Edited September 1, 2013 by cacoseraph