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NotSanguine writes:

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.