Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by takyon on Friday April 03 2015, @06:49PM   Printer-friendly
from the dirt-and-debris dept.

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.

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Sunday April 05 2015, @04:39PM

    by kaszz (4211) on Sunday April 05 2015, @04:39PM (#166693) Journal

    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.

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 2) by Yog-Yogguth on Monday April 06 2015, @09:22AM

    by Yog-Yogguth (1862) Subscriber Badge on Monday April 06 2015, @09:22AM (#166899) Journal

    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))