Researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder are starting to unlock the mystery behind the strange dust cloud that surrounds the surface of the moon.
Mihaly Horanyi, a physics professor at CU-Boulder, and his colleagues examined data collected by the Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) spacecraft and discovered what appears to be a formation of dust cloud unlike what the Apollo astronauts observed during their mission on the moon.
The researchers saw that the image on the moon was glowing, which some believe could likely be caused by floating particles of dust.
"LADEE was the first mission to carry a dedicated dust instrument in low-altitude orbit. All other attempts were either remote sensing imaging - struggling with line-of-sight issues," Horanyi said.
"The cloud we identified is comprised of bigger particles and their density is so low that this cloud could not have been noticed by the astronauts."
The researchers added that bodies in the solar system that are airless, such as the Martian moons, could potentially be engulfed by similar clouds of dust caused by particles from the icy Kuiper belt located across the other end of the solar system.
Horanyi explained that the dust clouds on the moon are typically formed when fragments from a passing comet hit the satellite's surface, causing thousands of moon dust particles to be carried off high above the ground.
The researchers recorded the largest formation of moon dust during the Geminid meteor shower, when the planet Earth and its moon passed through a thick belt of space debris.
The thickness of the dust cloud was measured at 260 pounds and it was raised to a height of about 70 miles from the surface of the moon. Horanyi said that this rise and fall of dust grains is what helps form the character of the moon.
Horanyi's interest in the phenomenon was first formed when he was still part of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA) Galileo mission that studied the planet Jupiter and its moons during the 1990s.
He worked on a dust detector system (DDS) that was able to find dust clouds surrounding the moons Callisto, Europa and Ganymede.
Horanyi said that they wanted to find out whether the moon of the Earth also has formations of dust clouds created by impacts of space dust particles.
The University of Colorado Boulder study is featured in the international weekly journal Nature.
Photo: Emilio Küffer | Flickr
