Moon's Ultra Thin Atmosphere

Lunar Atmosphere Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE)

By Lorelei

The (L.A.D.E.E) mission was a robotic mission that orbited around the moon to gather information about the lunar atmosphere. The LADEE spent 6 months collecting information about the lunar atmosphere.

The atmosphere on the moon is only one 25-trillionth of the atmosphere on earth. That means that gas particles held by the moon’s gravity are spread so far apart that they may never come in contact with each other. It’s so delicate that they don’t even call it an atmosphere, they call it an exosphere. By learning about the moon’s exosphere, we can learn something about other space objects with a nearly airless exosphere too, like Pluto, Mercury, and many of the icy moons in the outer solar system. It might help us learn how the solar system formed and what changes there have been.

LADEE discovered that most of the moons exosphere comes from meteorites that land there, even small ones. Scientists think that meteors brought water to the moon where it got trapped in the dark craters near the moon’s poles.