Related papers: Water Within a Permanently Shadowed Lunar Crater: …
The Lunar CRater Observations and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) mission impacted a spent Centaur rocket stage into a permanently shadowed region near the lunar south pole. The Sheperding Spacecraft (SSC) separated \sim9 hours before impact and…
With NASA's planned return to the moon and possibly with lunar outposts being formed, repeated landings at the same site will be necessary. Understanding rocket plume interaction with lunar and Martian surfaces is of paramount importance in…
Tools have been developed to model and simulate the effects of lunar landing vehicles on the lunar environment, mostly addressing the effects of regolith erosion by rocket plumes and the fate of the ejected lunar soil particles. The KSC…
Using the Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars (CRISM), we map the temporal variability of water ice absorption bands over the near-polar ice mound in Louth crater, Mars. The absorption band depth of water ice at 1.5 microns…
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…
The Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) Rover Environmental Monitoring Station (REMS) has now made continuous in-situ meteorological measurements for several martian years at Gale crater, Mars. Of importance in the search for liquid formation are…
Water ice is thought to be trapped in large permanently shadowed regions (PSRs) in the Moon's polar regions, due to their extremely low temperatures. Here, we show that many unmapped cold traps exist on small spatial scales, substantially…
The variation of remotely sensed neutron count rates is measured as a function of cratercentric distance using data from the Lunar Prospector Neutron Spectrometer. The count rate, stacked over many craters, peaks over the crater centre, has…
We report on observations made of the ~36km diameter crater, Louth, in the north polar region of Mars (at 70{\deg}N, 103.2{\deg}E). High-resolution imagery from the instruments on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) spacecraft has been…
Context. Airless planetary bodies are directly exposed to solar wind ions, which can scatter or become implanted upon impact with the regolith-covered surface, while also sputtering surface atoms. Aims. We construct a semi-analytical model…
Returning humans to the Moon presents an unprecedented opportunity to determine the origin of volatiles stored in the permanently shaded regions (PSRs), which trace the history of lunar volcanic activity, solar wind surface chemistry, and…
Space weathering is an important surface process occurring on the Moon and other airless bodies, especially those that have no magnetic field. The optical effects of the Moon's space weathering have been largely investigated in the…
In the companion paper ("Erosion rate of lunar soil under a landing rocket, part 1: identifying the rate-limiting physics", this issue) an equation was developed for the rate that lunar soil erodes under the exhaust of a landing rocket.…
Lunar laser ranging (LLR) data and Apollo seismic data analyses, revealed independent evidence for the presence of a fluid lunar core. However, the size of the lunar fluid core remained uncertain by $\pm55$ km (encompassing two contrasting…
Mars' polar layered deposits (PLD) are comprised of layers of varying dust-to-water ice volume mixing ratios (VMR) that may record astronomically-forced climatic variation over Mars' recent orbital history. Retracing the formation of these…
Time-limited space missions may miss rare occurrences of very dense clouds of lunar dust. At the same time, the information provided by the Earth-based monitoring of the Moon during at least the last three centuries still remains unused. In…
Here we discuss one of the current reservoirs of water on Mars, the regolith and rocks exposed at the surface. This reservoir is characterized by the presence of H_{2}O- and OH- bearing phases that produce a broad absorption at a wavelength…
Reliable energy delivery is a critical requirement for long-term lunar missions, particularly in regions with limited solar access, such as polar craters and during extended lunar nights. Optical Power Beaming (OPB) using high-power lasers…
We examine data obtained by the Lunar Penetrating Radar (LPR) onboard the Chang'E-4 (CE-4) mission to study the dielectric properties and stratigraphy of lunar regolith on the far side of the Moon. The data collected from January 2019 to…
The amount and distribution of water on the lunar surface are related to the input and production of water by solar wind and meteoroid bombardment, balanced by photodestruction and mobility across the surface. Using the Stratospheric…