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FYI: New Clues to Mysterious Moon Flashes

"New Clues to Mysterious Moon Flashes"

By Charles Seife, New Scientist. 10.21.99 

Reports of curious flashes and fleeting clouds on the Moon may not
be figments of wild imaginations, astronomers say. A new look at
observations by the American satellite Clementine show that a small
area on the Moon's surface darkened and reddened in April 1994.
Why this happened remains a mystery. 

For hundreds of years, people have reported seeing flashes,                                    short-lived clouds and other brief changes on the Moon's surface. But                                     astronomers have never been able to confirm the sightings. "The                                    events were observed on many occasions, but most astronomers                                     don't believe in them," says Bonnie Buratti of NASA's Jet Propulsion                                     Laboratory in Pasadena, California. 

On 23 April 1994, around a hundred amateur astronomers reported                                     seeing a possible darkening of the Moon, lasting 40 minutes, near the                                     edge of the bright lunar crater Aristarchus. At the same time, the US                                     Department of Defense's Clementine satellite was mapping the lunar                                    surface. 

Intrigued by the amateur reports, Buratti's team has taken a close                                    look at the Clementine data to see if the satellite also recorded the                                    event. Sure enough, they found that the crater looked different before                                    and after the amateur reports. "After the event, it looks redder," says                                    Buratti, who announced the findings at a meeting of the American                                    Astronomical Society in Padua, Italy, last week. 

Winifred Cameron, a retired astronomer who worked at the Lowell                                    Observatory in Arizona, thinks that brief colour changes might be                                     caused by small gas eruptions throwing dust around. We know that                                    there are pockets of gas in the lunar soil, and the gas may occasionally                                    escape. "I'm pretty sure that some of these changes are due to                                     emanations of gas that are more dense than usual," says Cameron.                                    "The Aristarchus region is the source of about a third of all of these." 

© New Scientist. This article appears on explorezone.com with permission



LOUIS VARRICCHIO
 Environmental Information Specialist &
 Producer/Writer, "Our Changing Planet"
  (Visit OCP-TV on the Web at: www.umac.org/ocp)
  Upper Midwest Aerospace Consortium
  Odegard School of Aerospace Sciences
  University of North Dakota
  Grand Forks, N.D. 58202-9007  U.S.A.
    Phone: 701-777-2482
    Fax: 701-777-2940
    E-mail: varricch@umac.org (in N.D.); morbius@together.net (in Vt.)

"Behind every man alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by
which the dead outnumber the living. Since the dawn of time, a hundred
billion human beings have walked the planet Earth." -- Arthur C. Clarke


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