NASA’s LADEE Spacecraft confirms Presence of Neon in Atmosphere of Moon

“The presence of neon in the exosphere of the moon has been a subject of speculation since the Apollo missions, but no credible detections were made”, said Mehdi Benna, one of the researchers, in a news release. Not a lot of neon, but neon nonetheless. It’s even relatively abundant, though the moon’s atmosphere is too thin (it’s actually called “exosphere” due to that reason) to turn it into a glowing orb in the sky. The tenous atmposphere on moon is about 100 trillion times less dense than Earth.

A dense environment like Earth’s is comparatively uncommon in our photo voltaic system as a result of an object needs to be sufficiently large to have sufficient gravity to carry onto it.

NASA instruments show that argon is most abundant on the moon during sunrise, neon is mostly detected at 4 a.m. and helium is at 1 a.m. Researchers have long pondered on the exact origins of the various gases – predominantly helium, argon, and neon – that make up the moon’s exosphere, most but not all of which comes from solar winds.

Benna agrees that it is “critical to learn about the lunar exosphere before sustained human exploration substantially alters it”, he said.

Since the moon’s environment is so skinny, rocket exhaust and outgassing from spacecraft might simply change its composition. The element Argon-40 is derived from decaying potassium-40 that can be found in terrestrial planet rocks as a leftover from its development. However, the moon’s atmosphere is technically referred to as an exosphere because it’s so thin, its atoms rarely collide.

Benna said that they also discovered that argon-40 causes the creation of a local bulge high above an odd part of the surface of the moon, which contains Oceanus Procellarum and Mare Imbrium. “One could not help to notice that this region happens to be where potassium-40 is most abundant on the surface”. Instead, it increased and then decreased by about 25 percent during the course of the LADEE mission.

While most of the thin lunar exosphere comes from wind generated from the sun, LADEE found that some gas in the exosphere comes from lunar rocks.

In addition to clearing up some lingering mysteries about Earth’s moon, the LADEE instrument signified a step toward modernizing production for NASA.

“These discoveries spotlight the restrictions of present exospheric fashions, and the necessity for extra refined ones sooner or later”, Benna concluded in a paper revealed within the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

The answer, according to NASA, is an abundance of neon. The spacecraft’s orbit naturally decayed following the mission’s final low-altitude science phase.