CANADA: Neon lights on the moon? Not quite, but NASA scientists say data from a lunar orbiter has confirmed the presence of neon in our cosmic companion’s atmosphere.
NASA’s Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer spacecraft, or Ladee, which spent seven months in orbit around the moon in late 2013, made the first-ever detection of neon in the thin lunar atmosphere.
Thin is the operative word when it comes to the lunar atmosphere, properly an “exosphere” because it’s so tenuous — around 100 trillion times less dense than our planet’s atmosphere at sea level, space agency scientists point out.
The detection confirmed for the first time what researchers have suspected since the 1970s and the Apollo missions, that noble gases like helium and argon — and neon — are present above the surface of the moon.
Those three elements make up most of the lunar atmosphere, likely coming to the moon in the solar wind of particles that bathe both the moon and the Earth.
“We were very pleased to not only finally confirm [neon’s] presence, but to show that it is relatively abundant,” says Mehdi Benna of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.
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