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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday February 01 2017, @05:41AM   Printer-friendly
from the still-not-breathable dept.

Oxygen ions from Earth are periodically transferred to the lunar surface, according to a new study:

A small bit of Earth's air leaks into space each day. (Don't worry, it's only about 90 metric tons out of a total of about 5 quadrillion metric tons.) Some atoms and molecules near the top of our atmosphere are simply moving so fast they overcome Earth's gravitational tug. Charged particles can be accelerated to even higher speed by our planet's magnetic field. Once these émigrés escape our world, they remain inside a teardrop-shaped region of space surrounding Earth called the magnetosphere (whose rounded end is pointed toward the sun) and are eventually blown away from the sun by the solar wind and into interplanetary space.

For the largest part of each month, the moon is bombarded with high-speed, highly charged atoms spewing from the sun and carried by the solar wind. But for 5 days every month, Earth's magnetosphere passes over the moon, shielding it from the solar particles and allowing slower speed particles from Earth to take their place, says Kentaro Terada, a cosmochemist at Osaka University in Toyonaka, Japan. Moon-orbiting probes experience the same conditions, he notes.

[...] During each burst of oxygen, an estimated 26,000 ions per second passed through each square centimeter of [the Kaguya moon-orbiting probe's] sensor, the researchers say. [...] Those atoms' origin in the ozone layer might also help explain a longstanding mystery about some grains of lunar soil brought back by Apollo astronauts. A few of those grains sport higher-than-normal proportions of oxygen-17 and oxygen-18 isotopes (as compared with the universe's predominant form of the element, oxygen-16). Notably, Terada and his colleagues say, previous studies have shown that the overall proportions of oxygen isotopes in the ozone layer also are skewed toward above-average concentrations of oxygen-17 and oxygen-18.

Biogenic oxygen from Earth transported to the Moon by a wind of magnetospheric ions (open, DOI: 10.1038/s41550-016-0026) (DX)


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