Strange Moon Pits Could Have Temperatures Comfortable Enough For Humans to Live In

The temperature on the Moon can vary from boiling to freezing depending on whether it's night or day, but scientists think there might be sheltered pits and caves where the temperature is reasonable.

According to new calculations, the temperature in such places is around 17 degrees Celsius. They are ideal locations for setting up base camps to explore the rest of the moon.

They may be able to offer some protection against meteorites and solar radiation. Future Moon settlers could focus on other things if they had a comfortable base.

When we live on the Moon, we might return to the caves we evolved in.

Pits on the Moon have been known for a long time. The researchers used images from the LRO to measure the temperature inside a pit on the Moon.

The researchers gauged that the sunlit portion of the pit could retain heat to bake hotter than the surface, reaching as high as 300 degrees Celsius.

Even after the Sun goes down, the trapped warmth in the shadows could help keep the cold temperatures there.

Is there enough room for a community of explorers to huddle? Some of them do, and that's the case on Earth, where tunnels are left behind by molten lava. It is1-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-6556 is1-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-6556

The team needed to estimate the temperatures of individual pixels in the images captured by the LRO in order to align and gather multiple photographs.

"Because nobody else had looked at it, we found that it had a bit of double vision, causing all of our maps to be a bit blurry," said Tyler Horvath, a planetary scientist from UCLA.

Each day and night on the Moon, the temperature on Earth can be as low as minus 173 degrees Celsius at night.

It would be quite an engineering challenge to protect both people and equipment during a long-term lunar research project.

NASA wants to explore the region further during the proposed Moon Diver mission, which will see a rover run down inside the Mare Tranquillitatis pit and check out any cave networks it might be connected to.

There are lunar pits on the surface of the moon. Knowing that they create a stable thermal environment helps us paint a picture of the unique lunar features.

The research has appeared in a journal.