Solar winds are blowing away the Moon's topsoil - NASA
Solar winds and plasma storms are "sandblasting" the Moon, according to top NASA boffins, causing large amounts of lunar surface material to be blown off into space. The new discoveries come to us from simulations conducted by NASA's Dynamic Response of the Environment At the Moon (DREAM) team. In particular the DREAMers …
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They're worried about sputtering on the LADEE?
Shouldn't this be flagged as NSFW?
I gotta say that "hecatonne" sounds like a lot more than what it actually is.
My goodness
This global warming is worse than I thought!
Damnit...
We'll never be able to grow anything there now!
<Pedantic comment about how it's impossible to grow anything on the moon due to the absence of water and oxygen which totally misses that the previous comment was a joke.>
Mars
I'm sure I read a while back something regarding the ease at which we could put small nuclear powered units at the Martian poles to provide said missing magnetic field, as a first step to potential terraforming.
I think the suggestion was that this should be protection enough to maintain a thin atmosphere (from cooking rocks like 'Robinson Crusoe in Space'?!) despite the lower gravity being a substantial cause of atmospheric loss.
How come nobody has claimed anthropogenity for this phenomenon?
Oh, they will. It's all the fault of robber baron capitalists or straight white male taxpayers or something.
This has obviously been happening for hundreds of millions of years. Why is it suddenly a problem?
Where in the article does it present this phenomenon as a problem.
To me it seem like the scientist think this phenomenon provides an opportunity to collect more data about the moon using a mission that is already planned to launch in the in near future.
No problems for us seem to have been mention in the article.
Decatonne?
I think these figures would be much easier to visualise if you would kindly convert 10 to 20 decatonnes into something more meaningful like African elephants, or Portsmouth-sized Olympic swimming pools.
Sure, no problem.
1 decatonne = 2381 Jb, so 10-20 dt = 23810-47620 Jb.
(to an accuracy of five parts in a million or so.)
You say "Imperial Jub"
And all I can think of is Queen Victoria.
<-- Beer to drown out the thought.
So when we finally get back there, the Apollo footprints will have been blown away. Nice one. I suppose 'the dog ate it..." never would have worked.
Lunar footprints by Apollo astronauts are forever...
Not.
The claim always sounded wrong to me. Very long lived, yes. Forever? No.
Better to find out now.
And not after we've spent trillions of dollars/yuan setting up Helium 3 mining equipment on the Moon before finding it's all been blown away.
I knew I was
allergic to something.. must be that moon dust!
Moon dust bunnies, anyone?
Discovery based on a simulation?
Can we really call this a discovery if if was done in the Land of Make-Believe? Really, NASA could just be having a bad DREAM.
When I saw the headline I thought...
...well that's NASA covering their arse when there are no footprints found on the moon.
verb and number
"The DREAM team plainly considers that this would be a mistake"
There, fixed that for you. I leave finding the other occurrences as an exercise to the reader.
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