Detection of Intact Lava Tubes at Marius Hills on the Moon by SELENE (Kaguya) Lunar Radar Sounder (original) (raw)
Related papers
2016
With the goal of expanding human presence beyond Earth, sub-surface empty lava tubes on other worlds form ideal candidates for creating a permanent habitation environment safe from cosmic radiation, micrometeorite impacts and temperature extremes. In a step towards Mars exploration, the Moon offers the most favorable pathway for lava tube exploration. In-depth analysis of GRAIL gravity data has revealed several candidate empty lava tubes within the lunar maria. The goal of this investigation is a proposed subsurface radar sounding mission to explore the regions of interest and potentially confirm the presence and size of buried empty lava tubes under the lunar surface.
Lunar Advanced Radar Orbiter for Subsurface Sounding (LAROSS): Lava Tube Exploration Mission
With the goal of expanding human presence beyond Earth, sub-surface empty lava tubes on other worlds form ideal candidates for creating a permanent habitation environment safe from cosmic radiation, microm-eteorite impacts and temperature extremes. In a step towards Mars exploration , the Moon offers the most favorable pathway for lava tube exploration. In-depth analysis of GRAIL gravity data has revealed several candidate empty lava tubes within the lunar maria. The goal of this investigation is a proposed subsurface radar sounding mission to explore the regions of interest and potentially confirm the presence and size of buried empty lava tubes under the lunar surface.
Evidence of large empty lava tubes on the Moon using GRAIL gravity
NASA's GRAIL mission employed twin spacecraft in polar orbits around the Moon to measure the lunar gravity field at unprecedentedly high accuracy and resolution. The low spacecraft altitude in the extended mission enables the detection of small-scale surface or subsurface features. We analyzed these data for evidence of empty lava tubes beneath the lunar maria. We developed two methods, gradiometry and cross correlation, to isolate the target signal of long, narrow, sinuous mass deficits from a host of other features present in the GRAIL data. Here we report the discovery of several strong candidates that are either extensions of known lunar rilles, collocated with the recently discovered " skylight " caverns, or underlying otherwise unremarkable surfaces. Owing to the spacecraft polar orbits, our techniques are most sensitive to east-west trending near-surface structures and empty lava tubes with minimum widths of several kilometers, heights of hundreds of meters, and lengths of tens of kilometers.
Long-lived volcanism on the lunar farside revealed by SELENE terrain camera
Science, 2009
34. We thank the engineers of NEC/Toshiba Space Systems Ltd., Nippon Antenna Co. Ltd., and Japan Aircraft Mfg. Co. Ltd. and the entire staff of the SELENE mission, and especially F. Fuke, who passed away 2 months after the launch. We thank D. Rowlands for help with modeling the four-way Doppler observable; F. Lemoine for discussions; and T. Arai, H. Takeda, C. K. Shum, and two anonymous reviewers.
Shallow lunar structure determined from the passive seismic experiment
The Moon, 1975
Data relevant to the shallow structure of the Moon obtained at the Apollo seismic stations are compared with previously published results of the active seismic experiments. It is concluded that the lunar surface is covered by a layer of low seismic velocity (Vv -~ 100 m s-l), which appears to be equivalent to the lunar regolith defined previously by geological observations. This layer is underlain by a zone of distinctly higher seismic velocity at all of the Apollo landing sites. The regolith thicknesses at the Apollo 11, 12, and 15 sites are estimated from the shear-wave resonance to be 4.4, 3.7, and 4.4 m, respectively. These thicknesses and those determined at the other Apollo sites by the active seismic experiments appear to be correlated with the age determinations and the abundances of extralunar components at the sites. The Moon 13 (1975) 57-66. All Rights Reserved Copyright © 1975 by D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordreeht-Holland 58 YOSIO NAKAMURA ET AL.