On September 6th, NASA will
be launching a new scientific probe to the moon. It’s called LADEE, the Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer. The mission’s scientific aim is to explore the moon’s atmosphere,
more accurately called an exosphere. An exosphere is a collection of gasses bound
to an object by its gravitational field but those gasses are so thinly
distributed that the atoms and molecules don’t even interact with each other. Because
of this, we’ve all been taught that the moon has no atmosphere.
LADEE, a car-sized robotic vehicle, will enter an orbit around the moon at only 20-60 km (12-37mi) in order to pass through the thin lunar exosphere that’s so close to the surface. For 100 days it will use its onboard instrumentation to analyze which gasses are bound to the moon and in what proportion they exist. The other phenomenon that will be investigated is the presence of lunar dust in the exosphere. One lander, sent before our astronauts arrived, Surveyor 7 (1968), photographed strange glowing on the horizon as the sun began to rise and when they arrived our Apollo astronauts also witnessed the glow during their stays on the moon (1969-1972). The prevailing theory is that this is the result of significant amounts of lunar dust above the surface. LADEE will determine if there is indeed any dust present. The interesting part about that experiment is that either way we’ll still have a mystery. If yes, how did it get up there? If no, what caused the glow?
Thanks for reading and stay tuned for more on LADEE and everything else spaceflight related!
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