A group of scientists discovered a cave on the Moon for the first time.
With at least 100 meters deep, they say it could be an ideal place for humans build a permanent base.
According to researchers, it is just one of probably hundreds of caves hidden in an “undiscovered underground world.”
Establishing a long-term human presence on the Moon requires protecting astronauts from radiation, extreme temperatures and space weather.
Helen Sharman, Britain’s first female astronaut, told BBC News that the newly discovered cave looked like a good place for a base. She also suggested that humans could live in lunar pits within 20 to 30 years.
But, he added, the cavern found is so deep that astronauts need to rappel and use “jetpacks or an elevator” to get out.
The discovery
Lorenzo Bruzzone and Leonardo Carrer from the University of Trento in Italy They found the cave thanks to a radar that they used to penetrate the opening of a well on a rocky plain on Earth’s satellite called the Sea of Tranquility.
The “sea” was probably once an ocean and is easily visible from Earth. It is also where Apollo 11 landed in 1969.
The cave has a skylight on the Moon’s surface, leading to vertical, overhanging walls and a sloped floor that could extend further underground.
Was formed does millions or billions of years when lava flowed over the satellite, creating a tunnel through the rock.
The closest equivalent on Earth would be the volcanic caves of Lanzarote, Spain, explains Professor Carrer.
“It’s really exciting. When you make these discoveries and look at these images, you realise that you are the first person in the history of humanity to see them,” Carrer said.
Once researchers understood the size of the cave, they realized it could be a good location for a lunar base.
“After all, life on Earth began in caves, so it makes sense that humans could live inside them on the Moon,” Carrer says.
The details of their discovery were published in the scientific journal Nature Astronomy.
The future of space research
The cave still has not been fully exploredbut experts hope that radar, cameras or even robots could be used to map it.
It was 50 years ago when scientists first speculated about caves on the Moon.
Then, in 2010, a camera from a mission called Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter He took photographs of wells, which were believed to serve as the entrances to these caverns.
However, its depth was unknown.
The work of Professors Bruzzone and Carrer answered that questionalthough much more remains to be done to understand the scale of the cave discovered.
“We have very good images of the surface (up to 25cm resolution), we can see the Apollo landing sites, but we don’t know anything about what’s beneath the surface. There is a huge opportunity for further discoveries,” Francesco Sauro, coordinator of the European Space Agency’s Planetary Caves Topical Team, told BBC News.
Research also could help us explore caves on Mars in the future, he said.
That could open the door to finding evidence of life on the Red Planet, because if it exists, it is almost certainly inside caves protected from the elements on its surface.
The lunar cave is possibly useful for humans, but scientists also emphasize that it can help us respond Fundamental questions about the history of the star and even our solar system.
This is because the rocks inside will not be as eroded by space weather, so they may provide an extensive geological record going back billions of years.
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