The temperature on the Moon can vary from boiling to freezing depending on whether it's night or day, but scientists think there might well be sheltered pits and caves where the temperature is quite reasonable – no matter what time it is.
Using computer models to analyze the thermal properties of the rock over time, the researchers gauged that the sunlit portion of the pit could retain heat to bake hotter than the surface, reaching as high as 300 degrees Celsius.Yet, in the nearby shadows, the trapped warmth could boost the otherwise freezing cold temperatures to something a little more temperate and keep it there even after the Sun goes down.
The next question is if those overhangs have enough room for a community of explorers to huddle. Imagery shots from space suggest that some of them do – and indeed, that's the case on Earth, where tunnels are left behind by molten lava flowing underneath the surface. It's possible that some pits are collapsed lava tubes.
Part of the research involved aligning and collating multiple photographs, removing inconsistencies until the team could estimate the temperatures of individual pixels in the images captured by the LRO. "Because nobody else had looked at things this small with Diviner, we found that it had a bit of double vision, causing all of our maps to be a bit blurry,"Each day and each night on the Moon lasts about 15 days on Earth, with temperatures varying from around 127 degrees Celsius during the day to around minus 173 degrees Celsius at night.
Both people and equipment would need protection from those extremes during long-term lunar research projects, which would be quite an engineering challenge; finding a habitable cave or two would be a very handy shortcut.mission, which would see a rover run down inside the Mare Tranquillitatis pit and check out any cave networks it might be connected to.from the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.
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