Related papers: Water on The Moon, I. Historical Overview

In Part I we recount the history of observation and laboratory measurement culminating with the excavation of water from a permanently shadowed region near the lunar South Pole by the impact of the LCROSS mission in 2009. In this…

For centuries some scientists have argued that there is activity on the Moon (or water, as recounted in Parts I & II), while others have thought the Moon is simply a dead, inactive world. The question comes in several forms: is there a…

The observed presence of water molecules in the dayside lunar regolith was an unexpected discovery and remains poorly understood. Standard thermophysical models predict temperatures that are too high for adsorbed water to be stable. We…

Understanding the sources of lunar water is crucial for studying the history of lunar evolution, and also the solar wind interaction with the Moon and other airless bodies. Recent observations revealed lunar hydration is very likely a…

The lunar history of water deposition, loss, and transport post-accretion has become an important consideration in relation to the possibility of a human outpost on the Moon. Very recent work has shown that a secondary primordial atmosphere…

The climate of early Mars remains a topic of intense debate. Ancient terrains preserve landscapes consistent with stream channels, lake basins, and possibly even oceans, and thus the presence of liquid water flowing on the Martian surface 4…

Characterised by a surface bound exosphere and localised crustal magnetic fields, the Moon was considered as a passive object when solar wind interacts with it. However, the neutral particle and plasma measurements around the Moon by recent…

The Earth's Moon is thought to have formed from a circumterrestrial disk generated by a giant impact between the proto-Earth and an impactor approximately 4.5 billion years ago. Since the impact was energetic, the disk would have been hot…

Three principal concepts regarding lunar formation have been examined: the accretion hypothesis, the mega-impact theory, and the multi-impact model. The multi-impact model amalgamates the salient facets of the mega-impact theory and the…

The most pragmatic first step in the all-but-inevitable 3rd-millennium V\"olkerwanderung of humanity throughout the Solar System is the establishment of a permanent human presence on the Moon. This research examines: 1. the human,…

Mars has surely been scrutinised since the dawn of humankind. In the 16th century Tycho Brahe made accurate observations of the position of Mars that enabled Johannes Kepler to obtain his first two laws of planetary motion. In the 17th…

Since the late 19th century, several investigators have estimated the mass of the atmosphere. Unlike previous studies, which focus on the average pressures on the earth's surface, this analysis uses the density of air above the earth's…

The nature of the early Martian climate is one of the major unanswered questions of planetary science. Key challenges remain, but a new wave of orbital and in situ observations and improvements in climate modeling have led to significant…

The frequently discovered flooding structure on Mars and other planets has long been an intriguing mystery remained un-disclosed so far. Considering that on Earth, quite a few low melting point liquid metals or their alloy can be candidates…

We address the thermal history of the Earth after the Moon-forming impact, taking tidal heating and thermal blanketing by the atmosphere into account. The atmosphere sets an upper bound of ~100 W/m^2 on how quickly the Earth can cool. The…

Direct measurements of the abundance of argon in the lunar atmosphere were made in 1973 by instruments placed on the Moon during the Apollo 17 mission, but the total daytime abundance is unknown due to instrument saturation effects; thus,…

Prior to the invention of the telescope many astronomers worked out theories of the motion of the Moon. The purpose of such theories was to be able to predict the position of the Moon in the sky. These geometrical models implied a certain…

Mars' wet-to-dry transition is a major environmental catastrophe, yet the spatial pattern, tempo, and cause of drying are poorly constrained. We built a globally-distributed database of constraints on Mars late-stage paleolake size relative…

The intense activity of cratering on the Moon and in the inner regions of the solar system was accomplished during the first 10^9 years [1]. Occasionally, some impact events occur even nowadays. In Section 1, we treat, from a historical…

It is not yet entirely clear whether Mars began as a warm and wet planet that evolved towards the present-day cold and dry body or if it always was cold and dry with just some sporadic episodes of liquid water on its surface. An important…