By IANS,
Washington : Polar lunar craters may be live with hundreds of volts of electrical energy, potentially triggered by solar winds blowing over natural obstructions.
Polar lunar craters are of interest because of resources, including water ice, which exist there.
The moon’s orientation to the sun keeps the bottoms of polar craters in permanent shadow, allowing temperatures there to plunge below minus 400 degrees Fahrenheit, cold enough to store volatile material like water for billions of years.
“However, our research suggests that, in addition to the wicked cold, explorers and robots at the bottoms of polar lunar craters may have to contend with a complex electrical environment as well, which can affect surface chemistry, static discharge, and dust cling,” said William Farrell of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Centre, Greenbelt, Md.
“This important work by Dr. Farrell and his team is further evidence that our view on the moon has changed dramatically in recent years,” said Gregory Schmidt, deputy director of the NASA Lunar Science Institute at NASA’s Ames Research Centre, Moffett Field, Calif.
“It has a dynamic and fascinating environment that we are only beginning to understand,” added Schmidt. Solar wind inflow into craters can erode the surface, which affects recently discovered water molecules.
Static discharge could short out sensitive equipment, while the sticky and extremely abrasive lunar dust could wear out spacesuits and may be hazardous if tracked inside spacecraft and inhaled over long periods.
Since the moon is only slightly tilted compared to the sun, the solar wind flows almost horizontally over the lunar surface at the poles and along the region where day transitions to night, called the terminator, said a NASA release.
The solar wind is a thin gas of electrically charged components of atoms — negatively charged electrons and positively charged ions — that is constantly blowing from the surface of the sun into space.
These findings were published in the March issue of the the Journal of Geophysical Research.