HONG KONG: The moon doesn’t have any gaudy casinos or buzzing diner signs, but it does have neon.
NASA’s LADEE spacecraft has made the first-ever detection of neon in the wispy lunar atmosphere, which is properly known as an “exosphere” because it’s so thin — about 100 trillion times less dense than that of Earth at sea level.
“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,” study lead author Mehdi Benna, of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, said in a statement. “We were very pleased to not only finally confirm its presence, but to show that it is relatively abundant.”
But the gas is not abundant enough on the moon to generate the famous neon glow, NASA officials said.
LADEE — which is short for Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer — studied the moon’s exosphere from orbit for seven months, from September 2013 through the end of its mission in April 2014.
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