Upstream | September 20, 2009 | 7 comments

Earth's Moon is Coldest Place in the Solar System, Colder than Pluto

source: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17810-moon-is-coldest-place-in-the-solar-system.html

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EmperorThan
Poor Pluto. First it gets kicked out of the planet club, now it's not even the coldest place in the solar system. Dark craters near the moon's south pole have snatched that title – which is good news for the prospects of finding water ice on Earth's companion.

The craters' towering rims block the sun from reaching their centres, like the long shadows cast by tall buildings at dusk. In this permanent darkness, they stay at a constant -240 °Celsius – more than 30 °C above absolute zero and 10 °C cooler than Pluto, which was measured at -230 °C in 2006.

"The lunar south pole is among the coldest parts of the solar system and may be in fact colder than what we expect from places like Pluto," NASA scientist Richard Vondrak said at a press conference on Thursday.

The cold temperature bodes well for the prospect of finding water ice deposits in the moon's shadowy pockets. Previous calculations had shown that water and other volatile gases would dissipate into space at temperatures above about -220 °C.

The measurements come from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), which launched in June.

The satellite's temperature sensor, DIVINER, measures the amount of emitted and reflected radiation given off by the surface. LRO has a number of other instruments designed to map properties such as topography and neutron levels – another possible indicator of water.

In July, the satellite sent back pictures of the Apollo landing sites to commemorate the 40th anniversary of humans on the moon. On Thursday, LRO's primary mission began to collect data that could be used to plan a possible return to the moon.

The temperature finding raises hopes that NASA's other current lunar satellite mission, LCROSS, the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, will find evidence of water when it crashes into a crater near the moon's south pole on 9 October.
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7 comments // Earth's Moon is Coldest Place in the Solar System, Colder than Pluto

  • blaino
    • 0
      blaino  

    • I don't think its colder than pluto. I mean pluto hardly gets any sun light but the moon get constant sunlight. It doesn't add up.

      but hell Im no astronomer.

    • 2 years ago
  • jade_azul16
  • remanns
  • bc_f
    • bc_f [removed]  
    • This comment was removed as a violation of community guidelines.
  • Sam_the_Wizer
    • 0
      Sam_the_Wizer  
    • bc_f:

      Partially. With an atmosphere you will get some greenhouse effect that maintains and distributes heat, but the kicker is the high rims on the craters that keep them from getting direct sunlight.

    • 2 years ago
  • EmperorThan
    • 0
      EmperorThan  
    • bc_f:

      Yeah what Sam_the_Wizer said. It's south polar region's crater walls are so high they block all light.

      And the moon does have a trace proto atmosphere despite popular belief that it has no atmosphere. There are wayward hydrogen particles and gases throughout a lot of deep space, anything with any gravitational pull can catch them, and being that the moon DOES have gravity albeit 1/5th of Earth's it can pull them in and has over the 4.5 billion years since it was formed.

      =D

    • 2 years ago
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