- author, Georgina Lanard
- role, Science journalist
Scientists have discovered a cave on the moon for the first time.
It’s at least 100 metres deep and they say it could be an ideal place for humans to build a permanent base.
Researchers say this is just one of possibly hundreds of caves hidden in an “undiscovered underground world.”
Countries are racing to establish a permanent human settlement on the moon, but astronauts need to be protected from radiation, extreme temperatures and space weather.
Helen Sharman, the first British astronaut in space, told BBC News that the newly discovered cave looked like a suitable place for a base, and suggested humans could be living in holes on the moon in 20 to 30 years’ time.
But the cave is so deep that astronauts may need to rappel and use “jetpacks or lifts” to get out, she said.
Lorenzo Bruzzone and Leonardo Carreru of the University of Trento in Italy discovered the cave by using radar to penetrate the opening of a hole in a rocky plain called the Mare Tranquility.
It is visible to the naked eye from Earth and was the site of the Apollo 11 landing in 1969.
The cavern has a lunar skylight that leads to vertical walls and a sloping floor that leads further underground.
It was created millions, maybe billions, of years ago when lava flowed on the Moon and created tunnels in the rock.
The closest known sites on Earth would be the volcanic caves on the Spanish island of Lanzarote, Prof Carrell explained, adding that the researchers had visited these caves as part of their research.
“It’s really exciting. When you make a discovery like this and see the images, you realise you’re the first person in human history to have seen it,” Professor Carell said.
Once Professor Brusone and Professor Carrel realized the size of the cavern, they realized it might be the perfect place for a moon base.
“After all, life on Earth began in caves, so it makes sense that humans could live in caves on the moon,” Professor Carell said.
The cave has yet to be fully explored, but researchers hope to be able to map it using ground-penetrating radar, cameras and even robots.
Scientists first noticed that there might be caves on the Moon about 50 years ago, and then in 2010, a camera on the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter captured pictures of a hole that scientists thought might be the entrance to a cave.
But researchers didn’t know how deep the cave was, or whether it had collapsed.
Professor Bruzzone and Professor Carel’s research has answered that question, but much more work is still needed to understand the cave’s full scope.
“We have very clear images of the surface with a resolution of 25 centimetres, and we can see the Apollo landing sites, but we don’t know anything about what lies below the surface, so the chances of discovery are great,” Francesco Sauro, team coordinator for the European Space Agency’s Planetary Cave Research, told BBC News.
The research could also be useful for future exploration of Martian caves, he says.
That could pave the way to finding evidence of life on Mars, because if there was life, it would almost certainly have been in caves protected from the Martian surface environment.
While the lunar caves may be useful to humanity, scientists stress that they could also help answer fundamental questions about the history of the moon and even the solar system.
The rocks in the caverns are less susceptible to damage and erosion from space weather, so they can provide an extensive geological record stretching back billions of years.
The research was published in the scientific journal Nature Astronomy.
Graphics: Jerry Fletcher
