Related papers: Water on The Moon, I. Historical Overview
The mean world climate has warmed since the 19th Century as the anthropogenic emission of greenhouse gases has increased the atmospheric opacity to thermal infrared radiation. Has this warming increased the frequency or severity of…
Early Mars climate research has well-defined goals (Mars Exploration Program Analysis Group 2018). Achieving these goals requires geologists and climate modelers to coordinate. Coordination is easier if results are expressed in terms of…
The debate over the early Martian climate is among the most intriguing in planetary science. Although the geologic evidence generally supports a warmer and wetter climate, climate models have had difficulty simulating such a scenario,…
Water is commonly associated to the existence of life. However, there is no clear reason why water should be the only liquid in which life could form and survive. Since the seminal work of L. J. Henderson in 1913, scientists are trying to…
The Moon is generally thought to have formed from the debris ejected by the impact of a planet-sized object with the proto-Earth towards the end of planetary accretion. Modeling of the impact process predicts that the lunar material was…
The origin, distribution, depth and volume of lunar volatiles remain open questions. One of the possible sources of Moon's volatiles is their volcanic outgassing during the peak of lunar volcanic activity ~3.5 Ga. This same outgassing would…
The search for water on the Lunar and Martian surfaces is a fundamental aspect of space exploration, contributing to the understanding of the history and evolution of these celestial bodies. However, the current understanding of the…
The presence and distribution of water on the Moon are fundamental to our understanding of the Earth-Moon system. Despite extensive research and remote detection, the origin and chemical form of lunar water (H2O) have remained elusive. In…
Martian surface morphology implies that Mars was once warm enough to maintain persistent liquid water on its surface. While the high D/H ratios (~6 times the Earth's ocean water) of the current martian atmosphere suggest that significant…
The classical theory of cold-trapped ice on the Moon and some modern theories are reviewed and compared with observational constraints. The "standard model" for lunar ice posits that ice has accumulated in polar cold traps after the spin…
The climate of early Mars has been hotly debated for decades. Although most investigators believe that the geology indicates the presence of surface water, disagreement has persisted regarding how warm and wet the surface must have been and…
The attraction of the Moon on objects at the surface of the Earth gives rise to a so-called tidal force which is of the order of 1/10,000,000 times the gravitational force of the Earth. For instance, when the Moon is located between the…
While the water molecule is simple, its condensed phase liquid behavior is so complex that no consensus description has emerged despite three centuries of effort. Here we identify features of its behavior that are the most peculiar, hence…
The ratio of nitrogen isotopes in the Martian atmosphere is a key constraint on the planet's atmospheric evolution. However, enrichment of the heavy isotope expected due to atmospheric loss from sputtering and photochemical processes is…
The sunlight reflected from the Moon during a total lunar eclipse has been transmitted through the Earth's atmosphere on the way to the Moon. The combination of multiple scattering and inhomogeneous atmospheric characteristics during that…
One popular view of Venus' climate history describes a world that has spent much of its life with surface liquid water, plate tectonics, and a stable temperate climate. Part of the basis for this optimistic scenario is the high deuterium to…
The lunar geological record has much to tell us about the earliest history of the Solar System, the origin and evolution of the Earth-Moon system, the geological evolution of rocky planets, and the near-Earth cosmic environment throughout…
This paper provides an overview of the Lunar Laser Ranging (LLR) experiments. The measurement principle is explained and its theory is derived. Both contributions, the direct reflected light from retroreflectors as well as the scattered…
Despite very high temperatures accompanying lunar origin, indigenous water in the form of OH has been unambiguously observed in Apollo samples in recent years. Such observations have prompted questions about the abundance and distribution…
Despite a fainter Sun, the surface of the early Earth was mostly ice-free. Proposed solutions to this so-called "faint young Sun problem" have usually involved higher amounts of greenhouse gases than present in the modern-day atmosphere.…