Detecting a moon crater with a temperature suitable for living people

The crater in the Mare Tranquillitatis region of the Moon.

The moon is not a hospitable and ideal place for life. The surface of the Moon is a barren desert, drier than anywhere else on Earth. The moon is covered with a sticky and sharp dust, exposed to intense radiation, showers of micrometeorites, and temperatures range from 127 degrees Celsius during the day to -173 degrees Celsius at night.

Several years ago, NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) discovered a promising hideout for future lunar explorers. Those are deep pits on the surface, seemingly leading down to caves and lava caves. They can be large enough to house an entire city, even serving as a sanctuary for plant and animal specimens like the Noah's Ark. These caves will be a natural shelter from radiation and micrometeorites.

In new research published in the journal Geophysical Review Letters on July 8, NASA scientists discovered that the moon crater can also stabilize temperature. They used data from Diviner, the thermal camera on the LRO, to calculate the temperature inside a 100m-deep lunar crater in the Mare Tranquilitatis region.

The team found that, in the always-dark part, the temperature changes only very slightly during a long day on the Moon, hovering around a pleasant 17 degrees Celsius. Basically, a person can walk play down there with just a light jacket on.

Any future base on the Moon will need careful climate control, but the new discovery suggests that perhaps the control system won't need to work so hard. These caves could play an important role in returning humans to the Moon, as early as 2024 according to NASA's plans.

"Humans evolved to live in caves and now we can go back to caves while living on the Moon," said study co-author David Paige.