NASA Will Spend $35 Million On A New Mission To Probe The Moon’s Mysterious Volcanoes

Science NASA Will Spend $35 Million On A New Mission To Probe The Moon’s Mysterious Volcanoes Jamie Carter Senior Contributor Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own. I inspire people to go stargazing, watch the Moon, enjoy the night sky New! Follow this author to improve your content experience. Got it! Jun 18, 2022, 08:00pm EDT | Share to Facebook Share to Twitter Share to Linkedin The Gruithuisen Domes on the Moon will be visited by a new NASA spacecraft.

NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University NASA has green-lit a mission to explore a region of the Moon never before visited in an effort to understand a geological mystery—and help future lunar colonists. The Lunar-VISE (Lunar Vulkan Imaging and Spectroscopy Explorer) robotic rover mission will cost $35 million and launch in 2026 to study the chemical composition of the Gruithuisen Domes, two mysterious volcanic features that appear to be made of rock hardened from cooled magma—possibly like Mount St. Helens in Washington State.

However, formations like the Gruithuisen Domes on Earth require oceans and plate tectonics, neither of which the Moon has or had. However they formed and evolved it’s thought that the domes, which appear to be warm, could be a source of heat for long term exploration of the Moon. The lunar surface around the Gruithuisen Domes is like nothing seen before by NASA.

The Gruithuisen Domes are in the western Mare Imbrium basin rim in the northwest of the Moon as we see it from Earth, which looks like this: The Mare Imbrium on the surface of the Moon, with the craters Plato and Archimedes clearly visible. . .

. [+] Photograph by Jamie Cooper. (Photo by SSPL/Getty Images) SSPL via Getty Images Lunar-VISE will have five scientific instruments, two on a stationary lander and three on a mobile rover.

It will spend 10 days exploring the summit of one of the domes, analyzing the lunar regolith and also exploring how dust interacts with the spacecraft and rover. “There’s potentially a treasure trove of knowledge waiting to be discovered, which will not only help us inform future robotic and human exploration of the Moon, but may also help us better understand the history of our own planet as well as other planets in the solar system,” said Donaldson Hanna, the principal investigator of Lunar-VISE, at the University of Central Florida. MORE FOR YOU New Research Finds A Connection Between Domestic Violence And These Two Personality Disorders This Scientist Helps Andean Forests And Ecuador’s Women In STEM Exceptional Fossil Preservation Suggests That Discovering Dinosaur DNA May Not Be Impossible The mission was one of two to come through NASA’s Payloads and Research Investigations on the Surface of the Moon (PRISM) program.

It’s part of the space agency’s plan to use more commercial companies to take payloads to the Moon in advance of its Artemis program of crewed missions scheduled to put two astronauts on the Moon in 2024. The other mission that will now go to the Moon will be the Lunar Explorer Instrument for space biology Applications (LEIA) science suite, is a small CubeSat-based device that will deliver a yeast to the lunar surface and then study its response to radiation and lunar gravity. It will help scientists calculate how humans on the Moon long-term could have their DNA damaged by partial gravity and deep space radiation .

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