Scientists have made a breakthrough discovery in a newly found, huge cave system under the Moon’s surface, which can turn out to be one of the havens for future human settlers. This comes nearly 55 years after the historic landing by Apollo 11, just in the vicinity where Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin made their first footsteps on the lunar surface.
Using radar images taken in 2010 by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, researchers have corroborated that pits on the Moon’s surface are, in effect, “skylights” of large underground caves and tunnels. Structures like these could inherently provide ideal shelter for lunar bases from the hostile environment on the Moon.
This cave can be reached through a pit in Mare Tranquillitatis, a basaltic basin where Apollo 11 landed on July 20, 1969. The reason this area is not considered an ideal place for human settlement is that no water ice can be found there, but this discovery still infers that similar caves may exist at the polar locations on the moon, where water is thought to be present in the form of ice.
Leonardo Carrer and colleagues from the University of Trento, Italy, have made their revelation to Nature Astronomy. They now report that the Mare Tranquillitatis pit, measuring something close to 100 meters wide and between 130 to 170 meters deep, descends into a widely scattered cave system beneath the lunar surface. Re-analyzing radar data, along with computer simulations, the team has said that the radar reflections map a subsurface cave conduit of at least tens of meters long.
“This discovery is incredibly exciting,” said Carrer, pointing out that the cave could provide natural shelter from cosmic rays and a stable temperature environment. While the surface temperature of the Moon reaches as high as 121°C in the daylight and as low as -133°C at night, the shaded environment inside the cave will have a quite stable temperature, making it an ideal place for building shelters.
These caves, in the future, will have to be assessed for structural integrity if humans are to make their way into them. The tubes were created billions of years ago when volcanic activity on the Moon formed a hard crust on top of the flowing lava, creating a hollow tube when the magma flow stopped.
“These caves have been theorized for over 50 years, but it is the first time that we have demonstrated their existence,” said Lorenzo Bruzzone, also from the University of Trento. The researchers have estimated the cave to lie between 30 and 80 meters in length and around 45 meters wide, with a flat floor suitable for construction.
If they could be discovered near the poles, this would be even more advantageous because of both shelter and accessibility to water ice in shadowed craters. This would bring, therefore, a twofold benefit, reducing the cost and complexity involved in establishing a long-term human presence on the Moon.
This could become particularly important as NASA plans to send the first crewed mission to the Moon in more than 50 years. The ability to make use of natural shelters like these caves could make a dream of a sustainable human settlement on the Moon a reality.
These findings were referred to by Mahesh Anand, professor of planetary science and exploration at the Open University. He pointed out that underground structures would provide shelter from the severe conditions on the Moon’s surface and frequent meteorite impacts, so they are quite suitable for habitation.
It is now, with this new view of the Moon’s underground topography, not a distant dream but a possible one that someday astronauts will live inside volcanically formed caves on the Moon.