Jacob Aron at New Scientist reports on new research based on data collected by NASA's Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer.
The research, presented on March 16, 2015 at the 46th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, details the discovery of a second "tail" of material trailing behind the moon.
According to the article, Anthony Colaprete theorizes that if the same processes are at work in other parts of the solar system, these techniques could provide a way to remotely characterize the surfaces of other celestial bodies.
Data from NASA's Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE), which spent seven months orbiting the moon in 2013 and 2014, has revealed a tail of nanoscale dust particles.
The finding follows the discovery of the first lunar tail in 1999, when ground-based telescopes spotted a faint stream of sodium gas stretching out behind the moon for hundreds of thousands of kilometres.
Anthony Colaprete, who is in charge of LADEE's spectrometer instrument, wanted to get a closer look at the sodium tail, so positioned LADEE on the dark side of the moon and pointed it away from the sun. The spectrometer works by looking at the patterns of light wavelengths that different substances emit or reflect. In this position, the instrument picked up the sodium, but there also seemed to be something else, a brighter signal in the blue and ultraviolet wavelengths.
(Score: 1) by Megahard on Friday April 03 2015, @07:28PM
I guess dust tails leading in front of the moon would be a lot harder to explain.
Also, how may others hear Styx on reading LADEE?
(Score: 4, Informative) by wonkey_monkey on Friday April 03 2015, @07:38PM
I guess dust tails leading in front of the moon would be a lot harder to explain.
Depends how you define "trailing," "behind," or "in front of."
I think all are similarly misleading. The tails are caused by the pressure of sunlight, so they stream out from the Moon in the opposite direction to the Sun.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 3, Insightful) by ikanreed on Friday April 03 2015, @07:40PM
Yes, and, in particular, that means that when the moon is waxing, it's "in front" of the path of the moon.
(Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Friday April 03 2015, @09:05PM
Unless you're in the Southern hemisphere.
--
(well, your comment made me ponder fruitlessly for two minutes, so I wanted to do the same others)
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 2) by el_oscuro on Friday April 03 2015, @11:44PM
I think the same is for comets. The trails lead away from the Sun, so if the comet is travelling away from the sun, the "trail" would actually be in front of the comet.
SoylentNews is Bacon! [nueskes.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 03 2015, @08:00PM
Ssssnooorrrt. Good stuff.
(Score: 3, Funny) by bob_super on Friday April 03 2015, @10:13PM
Now you know why the furries howl at the moon.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Saturday April 04 2015, @03:04PM
How does the moon dust get into orbit so consistently in the first place?
(Score: 2) by Yog-Yogguth on Sunday April 05 2015, @10:41AM
I don't know at all (and haven't RTFA) but I think this is your answer [usra.edu] (PDF warning 262 KB, read at least the first column). It is only one attempt at explanation, it might be partially or completely wrong, and there might be other additional answers.
By the way (and while one figures it out) the paper uses HG as an abbreviation for ‘Horizon Glow’.
It's a bit sad that this isn't more widely know about since it's both so beautiful and interesting. The Wikipedia page on the Lunar terminator [wikipedia.org] (sometimes called a terminator line even though it's a ring which looks like a sinusoidal wave when on a flattened map) lacks all of the info, if no one who knows better updates it then maybe eventually I'll get around to doing it despite me not really knowing anything about it.
Or never mind about that: this [wikipedia.org] WIkipedia page has at least a little about it (though I can't say I like seeing it being called “mysterious”).
Bite harder Ouroboros, bite! tails.boum.org/ linux USB CD secure desktop IRC *crypt tor (not endorsements (XKeyScore))
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Sunday April 05 2015, @04:39PM
So it's electromagnetic charging by the sun and subsequent alike charges between dust and planet surface that causes them to repel and thus levitate up 100 km above surface. That makes sense.
(Score: 2) by Yog-Yogguth on Monday April 06 2015, @09:22AM
I don't feel knowledgeable enough to say for sure but yes I think that's the gist of it. It probably helps that a lunar night is two weeks long and that it is a continuous uninterrupted process as the moon slowly rotates in relation to the sun (i.e. the moon waxing and waning as we see it from Earth).
Meteorite impacts, landings, and “lithobraking”/crashes might/should temporarily add a little to it directly and despite melting and/or agglutinating/sintering together some of the surface it indirectly adds all of it by eroding/crushing other parts of the surface and slowly over time creating lunar dust.
Most details surrounding all of this seem unclear or unquantified. The previously linked LADEE mission was aimed at figuring out more of this or at least get more data on it.
Bite harder Ouroboros, bite! tails.boum.org/ linux USB CD secure desktop IRC *crypt tor (not endorsements (XKeyScore))