NASA is preparing to launch its third lunar mission in four years which is described as the last vestige of a series of orbital and robotic landings to the moon towards the end of the decade.
Dubbed as LADEE (Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer), the mission aims to study the seemingly weak lunar atmosphere and solve the mystery behind the horizon’s puzzling glow. The latter has already been discovered in the mid to late 1960s by the agency’s Surveyor landers as well as by the astronauts that manned the Apollo missions.
These surveyor landers described it as a thin band of light that is found above the moon’s surface along its terminator or day-night line. The spotted bands, explained by senior scientist Paul Spudis at Houston’s Lunar and Planetary Institute, seem to hover above the surface by one to two meters.
On the other hand, astronauts that are orbiting around the moon described it as a stream of light that extends above the surface in hundreds of kilometers. The reflected light from the suspended lunar dust is the sole explanation for such phenomenon. However, the mysterious glow was not detected by the Clementine orbiter when it went to the moon in 1994.
Hopefully, the LADEE mission would be able to finally end the debate on whether the mysterious glow is indeed happening or just a product of one’s vivid imagination.
The $280 million lunar mission is scheduled to launch on September 6 through the US Air Force Minotaur V rocket which is a converted intercontinental ballistic missile. It will be the five-stage rocket’s maiden flight and the first deep-space mission that has ever been launched from the launch facility of Goddard Space Flight Center’s Wallops located on the Virginia coast.
The idea that the moon has an atmosphere somehow contradicts what most of us have learned in school about the Earth’s only satellite. Sarah Noble, program scientist of the lunar mission, explains that the moon does have an atmosphere. When compared to Earth’s atmosphere which has 100 billion atoms for every cubic centimeter, the moon has around 100,000 to 10 billion atoms that make up its thin atmosphere. Since the atmospheric molecules are very few and have huge gaps, they never interact nor collide with each other.
This was first reported by the Christian Science Monitor
