Can you create an atmosphere on the moon

Use Adobe Acrobat Reader version 10 or higher for the best experience. The description of a method for creating a lunar atmosphere similar to that of the earth. If the lunar crust were deliberately and methodically broken, simulating earthquake and volcanic activity on the planets, some of the stored gases and vapors could be released to form a lunar atmosphere. The second scenario is for a more advanced civilization, which slows down the impactor until it becomes a satellite.

Then, it is de-orbited slowly, for a much softer impact. A more advanced civilization would be able to extract gasses from a giant planet and transport them to the planet and moon they want to terraform. Some celestial bodies like Mars have water and gasses trapped in rocks and beneath surface.

Heating might in some cases just be enough to create an atmosphere. In other cases, a combined heating and impacting process could be used. Some of the moons that orbit gas giants have large amounts of ices and gasses trapped within ice. For them, the best solution is to bring a small amount of gas for example, impacting with a comet with a diameter of 7 km. The impact will create a tenuous atmosphere, which might be enough to allow us deploy Greenhouse Gases. Then, as temperature would increase, the ice will start to melt, releasing trapped gasses from the ice.

The process will continue until it will reach an equilibrium phase. What would happen immediately after we add an atmosphere? Some gasses will be absorbed in the rocks or will make chemical reactions with them. This process will occur soon after we create an atmosphere and will slow down soon too. We have to consider this when we calculate how much gas we need.

If we brought the air with an impactor, we also create a massive increase in temperature, melting all ices. At this point we have to start working on terraforming the atmosphere. We will add greenhouse gasses as the temperature is still high. We also have to consider that once we produce oxygen, it will react with many rocks on the surface and might ignite gasses in the atmosphere, like methane. This will affect atmospheric composition and mass.

A third thing that will happen is, when we create oceans, that gasses can be dissolved into water. This works for oxygen and nitrogen, but in much larger concentrations for carbon dioxide. Gasses can exist in the first ocean we create and can escape into the atmosphere. On the Moon, atoms struck by the light and particles from our Sun can easily impart them with escape velocity, while this hardly ever happens on Earth.

Sodium atoms are knocked out of the Moon's atmosphere by the Sun, creating a tail. When this tail At left, a view of the night sky with an all-sky camera from Earth during the new Moon.

The stars That same image, with the stars subtracted out at right , clearly reveals the Sodium Moon Spot, which can then be seen in the left image where the yellow arrow points. This feature only appears during the new Moon. The same size differences can also occur during the new Moon. The closer perigee occurs to the new Moon, the larger the signal from the Moon's sodium tail becomes here on Earth. When the Moon passes between the Earth and Sun, even if the alignment is too poor for an eclipse, Earth gravitationally disrupts the path of the tail, focusing and distorting it like a finger moving across the end of a rushing garden hose.

A view of many meteors striking Earth over a long period of time, shown all at once, from the ground The same debris streams that impact Earth throughout the course of the year also impact the Moon, and while they create mostly atmospheric phenomena on Earth, it's suspected that these impacts create the majority of the Moon's atmosphere itself.

Perhaps impacts indirectly drive this lunar tail. And what if there were a planetary disaster on Earth in the early decades of the colony? From a location close to Earth, the colony might actually be able to provide some help. A colony on the moon, on the other hand, would be within easy reach. Like Mars, the moon has caverns and caves that can be sealed for paraterraforming, along with craters that can be enclosed with pressure domes.

A colony in that location would have access to large deposits of water ice and would be situated on the boundary between lunar sunlight and darkness. Its proponents estimate a Shackleton dome colony could support 10, settlers after just 15 years of assembly by autonomous robots.

In the event of an Earth-wide disaster, evacuating people to the moon would be far easier than to Mars. Another, even nearer option would be free space colonies. These would be built using materials mined from the moon or from near-Earth asteroids. The colonies could be located in the Earth-moon system at sites that are gravitationally advantageous, known as Lagrangian points.

Utilizing Earth-moon Lagrangian points, it would be relatively easy to transport lunar materials to the site of the planned colony and build it, and the travel time from Earth would be similar to the travel time to the moon, meaning a few days with current technology. All planets and large moons have enough gravity to hold an atmosphere, so terraforming in theory is widely possible. But in terms of human life not all gravities are created equal.

On Mars you weigh 0. Thus far, NASA and other organizations have studied effects of partial gravity to a limited extent on humans by producing Mars and lunar gravity for short periods under a minute during parabolic flight. For long-term effects, which in weightlessness involve not only bone demineralization, but also muscle atrophy, immune system effects, and other complications throughout the body, there is no way to replicate partial gravity on Earth.

We can simulate it with various contraptions that have allowed researchers to study things like walking on Mars and whatnot. We can put people in bed for long periods with the beds angled so as to simulate the shifting of fluids on Mars or other worlds. So considering the air and gravity along with the distance from Earth, Mars actually may not be the best candidate for an off-world colony.