Space: What's the story behind the tunnels under the moon that could accommodate astronauts?
A study will confirm a 50-year-old discovery that the Moon is home to numerous solidified lava tubes.
An international team of scientists from the University of Trento in Italy has caused a stir with their study, published July 15 in the journal Nature astronomy.
Researchers say the moon has caves and even tunnels that were carved naturally by lunar lava dating back to when Earth's satellite had intense volcanic activity. Or billions of years ago.
Confirmation answers a question that has been around for more than 50 years, as many astrophysicists and astronomers have long suspected that the moon's surface is home to solidified lava tubes resulting from ancient magma flows.
200 wells were discovered in 2009.
This theory was reinforced in 2009 when a Japanese spacecraft orbiting the moon discovered more than 200 wells on the moon's surface.
From this discovery, scientists speculated that these shafts were created precisely by the collapse of tunnels that dug into the lunar basement. However, it was necessary to prove that the interior of these shafts communicated laterally with the hypothetical tunnels.
Researchers from the University of Trento have proven the existence of the tunnels by reinterpreting data from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter radar dating back to 2010.
“Lava tube under the surface”
“We analyzed these data using sophisticated signal processing techniques we recently developed and discovered reflections that provide the first direct evidence of an accessible lava tube beneath the Moon’s surface,” said Lorenzo Bruzzone, a professor at the University of Trento.
According to this discovery, the tunnels could be between 25 and 75 metres long, with corridors that could be kilometres long.
These tunnels are important because they could serve as a safe place for astronauts during future missions as humanity decides to return humans to the moon in the very near future.
Temperature, radiation, and meteorites.
Thus, they can provide a constant temperature, “around 16 or 17 degrees,” the researchers determined, while the Moon undergoes very strong variations between day and night that can range from +127 degrees Celsius to -173 degrees Celsius.
These tunnels can also mitigate cosmic and solar radiation, which can be up to 150 times stronger than on Earth, but they also protect astronauts from meteor impacts.