A lunar city sounds possible until you calculate how fast it would use its waterNASA will host an International Observe the Moon Night celebration from 5:30 to 8 p.m. CST on Saturday, Sept. 19, at the U.S. Space & Rocket Center, the official visitor center for NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.
International Observe the Moon Night celebrates the Moon, the science behind it, and its connection to space exploration and human culture. NASA’s free public event will include agency experts delivering talks on lunar science and exploration and highlighting lunar observations made by the Artemis II crew in April.
Media interested in covering the event should confirm their attendance with Joel Wallace, joel.w.wallace@nasa.gov, in the NASA Marshall newsroom by 3 p.m., Friday, Sept. 18. Media must report to the Davidson Center to participate in the event. Visitor parking is available at the U.S. Space & Rocket Center.
NASA will have opportunities for media to capture visuals and interview agency experts. Activities available for coverage include hands-on STEM activities, a science stage show, an event photo booth, and face-painting.
The event also features Janet Ivey, the host of the television children’s series, “Janet’s Planet.” The Von Braun Astronomical Society will be on-site with telescopes, providing attendees with guided tours of the Moon, planets, and other celestial objects.
The evening is presented by the Planetary Missions Program Office at NASA Marshall.
For more information about International Observe the Moon Night, visit:
https://science.nasa.gov/moon/observe-the-moon-night/overview
Joel Wallace
Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Ala
256-786-0117
Dr. Stephen Kane from the University of California, Riverside and colleagues offer a tidy explanation for one of the Solar System’s enduring puzzles: why Venus, so similar to Earth in size and mass, has no moon at all.
The post New Study Explains Why Venus Has No Moon appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.
In April, the world watched as four humans circled the Moon for the first time in over 50 years with NASA’s Artemis II mission. On Saturday, Sept. 19, the public is invited to look up again with NASA events across the country, including the International Observe the Moon Night celebration held at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Visitor Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
International Observe the Moon Night is an annual celebration that brings people together to learn about the Moon and explore our connection to Earth’s nearest celestial neighbor. Since the program began in 2010, people around the world have participated through lunar observations, hands-on activities, artwork, music, and more.
At NASA Goddard, this year’s celebration will highlight the agency’s ongoing exploration of the Moon, including the historic Artemis II mission. Visitors can peer behind the scenes to learn more about what it took to make Artemis II’s journey around the Moon a success and discover how Goddard scientists and engineers are helping advance our understanding of the Moon, solar system, and beyond.
The event will run from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. EDT.
Throughout the event at NASA Goddard, visitors can take part in interactive hands-on activities, create artwork and crafts, and capture selfies at a photo kiosk. Telescopes will also be set up outside (depending on weather), giving attendees an opportunity to observe the Moon and other astronomical objects up close. Inside the Visitor Center, guests can even see a real Apollo 14 Moon rock on display.
The event will also offer a chance to learn more about the groundbreaking research happening at NASA Goddard as scientists work to unlock the secrets of the Moon with missions like the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) and explore our solar system and the universe beyond.
International Observe the Moon Night at Goddard is free and family friendly. Registration is not required, although registering in advance will help the Visitor Center team plan for the event. The event will take place rain or shine, and free parking is available at the Visitor Center.
Additional event details, including registration, accessibility and other logistics: https://www.nasa.gov/goddard/visitor-center/events-and-programs/.
For people who cannot travel to Greenbelt, there are opportunities to participate in International Observe the Moon Night from all around the planet. Join lunar observers around the world by observing the Moon with friends and family, attending a virtual event or finding an event in your area. Learn more and register your participation at go.nasa.gov/ObserveTheMoon.
International Observe the Moon Night is sponsored by NASA’s LRO mission and the Solar System Exploration Division of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, with support from many partners. The celebration is a way for people to pause and look up at our future destination, as NASA prepares for deep space missions to the Moon and beyond.
To learn about NASA’s Artemis program, visit:
https://www.nasa.gov/artemis
To learn about LRO, visit:
https://www.nasa.gov/lro
The Moon may have emerged largely intact within hours of the colossal impact that shaped its birth. Earth has an unusually large moon for a planet of its size and position in the solar system, yet scientists still do not fully understand how that companion came to exist. Now, researchers from the Southwest Research Institute [...]The discovery of water at the poles of the moon has inspired speculation about whether we can build there – cities, industrial neighborhoods, places where people work and live. But is there enough water, and can we use it efficiently enough? In their new article in Frontiers in Space Technologies, Dr. Martin Elvis and Dr. Jonathan McDowell do the math. Even at the most generous estimates of the available water and recycling efficiency, a city of one million people would only last 100 years before all the water runs out. In this guest editorial, which Frontiers in Space Technologies provided, Elvis breaks down what we can and can't do with the technology available.
The discovery of water in dark craters at the moon's poles has sparked a "moon rush" to establish bases there, and then villages, cities and heavy industry. How sustainable is this rush?
Soon after the moon was formed, asteroids bombarded it, creating its pockmarked topography. Near the moon's poles, there are dozens of crater floors that have not seen direct sunlight in about four billion years. Many of these cryogenically cold "pits of eternal darkness" are below a temperature of 110 Kelvin (minus 262 degrees Fahrenheit), forming "cold traps" in which water ice won't sublimate away by more than a millimeter in a billion years, even in the vacuum at the moon's surface. And there is water to freeze: some of those asteroids brought it along with them. Since 2013 we have known that that water is still there, possibly as much as a billion tons of it, thanks to a succession of moon-orbiting missions that have mapped out likely locations in increasing detail.
The presence of water at the lunar poles changes everything about human visits to the moon. Suddenly it is practical to envisage a "moon village" where people could survive without importing every last bit from Earth. They could grow their own food and have showers and functional toilets, unlike the astronauts on the International Space Station (ISS). This possibility has sparked ambitions from the likes of Jeff Bezos to move heavy industry to the moon and Elon Musk's aims to have "self-growing cities" there. These are enticing visions, but are they attainable?
The good news
We realized that we could make a first feasibility estimate simply by looking at how much power and water a large population would use on the moon, and how long a city of 100,000 or one million people could survive there. How sustainable is a city on the moon?
The good news is that power, even without nuclear reactors, is not a problem. That's because the rims of the craters containing the pits of eternal darkness are in almost permanent sunlight. (That's why they are sometimes, slightly incorrectly, referred to as the "peaks of eternal light.") Up on those highly illuminated rims it would be possible to generate three gigawatts of electricity using kilometer-tall towers covered with photovoltaic arrays. It should be possible to manufacture solar panels on the moon. There's certainly plenty of silicon. This could even make AI data centers on the moon possible, by placing them near these sunny peaks. That would be the start of a true lunar economy.
The bad news is that, even assuming a generous one billion tons of water to start with, without recycling the answer to our question of sustainability is that the city would last only a few years. Even in the best-case scenario, with 98% efficient recycling of water — the same as achieved on the ISS — a one-million-person city will run out of water in just over a century. That is a problem for sustainable moon settlement. And today's best estimates of the amount of water on the moon are about 30 times less than a billion tons, shortening the time to water exhaustion by the same factor. This means that even a small city would run dry after just a decade or so. A moon village with a thousand people, or even a town with 10,000 people, would instead be sustainable for several centuries or more.
There are potential solutions. We could improve the efficiency of water recycling by a factor of five or more; lower water usage from new techniques such as vertical farming; import water, probably from accessible asteroids; or, simply, find more water. Of these it may be this last hope that is most promising. Current water surveying techniques do not reach below the surface more than a few meters, while the rubble-like rocks of the surface regolith typically extend tens of meters down and may contain water in the cold traps. If the ambitious plans of the space billionaires are to be realized, then finding more water will be the first step.
Mercury has been slowly shrinking for billions of years. But scientists studying the smallest planet in the solar system may have overlooked just how dramatic that transformation has been because some of the evidence has literally been buried.
A new study suggests Mercury’s battered, crater-covered surface has concealed a significant fraction of the faults created as the planet cooled and contracted. After accounting for those hidden geological structures, researchers estimate Mercury may have shrunk by as much as 7.2 miles (11.6 kilometers) in radius—up to 30% more than previous estimates based on the same tectonic record.
The findings could alter models of how Mercury’s interior evolved and raise an interesting possibility beyond the planet itself. For instance, scientists may also be underestimating how much other rocky worlds, particularly the Moon, have contracted.
“Combined with the contractional strain map from Broquet and Andrews-Hanna (2026a), we show that radial contraction may have been underestimated by 10%–30%,” researchers write. “Our radial contraction correction should be considered as a lower bound.”
In the study published in Geophysical Research Letters, researchers led by Dr. Gaku Nishiyama of the German Aerospace Center (DLR) examined a longstanding mystery in Mercury’s geology.
As a rocky planet loses heat, its interior contracts. Much like the skin of a drying fruit, the planet’s rigid exterior must accommodate a shrinking interior, producing faults and enormous cliff-like features known as lobate scarps, along with wrinkle ridges and other shortening structures.
Scientists therefore use the crustal shortening recorded by these structures as a geological ruler to determine how much Mercury has contracted.
The problem is that those structures aren’t distributed across Mercury the way scientists might expect.
If cooling caused the entire planet to contract, the resulting deformation should be comparatively widespread. Instead, previous mapping has revealed regions filled with large scarps alongside enormous areas where surprisingly few contractional structures have been identified.
Dr. Nishiyama and his colleagues investigated whether at least part of that discrepancy could be an illusion created by Mercury’s extraordinarily battered surface.
The researchers constructed a global map of Mercury’s surface roughness using topographic measurements acquired from NASA’s MESSENGER mission and a global digital terrain model produced from spacecraft imagery.
They then compared that roughness with previously cataloged tectonic structures.
Findings showed that fault scarps and other shortening structures were preferentially identified in smoother terrain, while rougher regions contained substantially fewer detectable structures. The relationship remained apparent across geographic scales extending to roughly 93 miles or about 150 kilometers.
That is counterintuitive because tectonic ridges themselves create topographic roughness. If roughness and plate movements were unrelated, areas with scarps might be expected to be slightly rougher than the surrounding terrain.
Instead, the researchers found the opposite.
One explanation is evident around relatively young impact craters such as Rachmaninoff. Large impacts blasted enormous quantities of debris across the surrounding landscape, producing thick blankets of material and secondary craters. In some locations, long tectonic structures appear to lose relief as they approach these deposits—consistent with the older structures being progressively hidden under impact material.
Other faults may still exist but become difficult to recognize against heavily cratered terrain. Once the surrounding topography becomes rough enough, a weathered ridge only a little higher than the background landscape can effectively disappear into the geological noise.
There is also a third possibility.
Heavily cratered regions may contain thick, porous layers of broken rock called regolith. During planetary contraction, some deformation could be absorbed as pores collapse rather than producing large faults visible from orbit. Alternatively, deformation could create faults too small for current observations to resolve. The researchers say available evidence cannot yet rule out that possibility.
Whatever mechanism is responsible, Dr. Nishiyama and his colleagues argue the relationship creates a systematic bias, where scientists see more evidence of contraction where Mercury’s surface makes that evidence easier to preserve and identify.
The team developed a correction using comparatively smooth regions, where tectonic structures appear less affected by this bias.
Applied to an earlier global estimate of 5.2 miles (8.3 kilometers) of radial contraction, the correction increased Mercury’s estimated shrinkage to roughly 7.2 miles or about 11.6 kilometers.
Depending on which tectonic structures are included, the researchers estimate surface roughness could have caused previous calculations to underestimate Mercury’s contraction by roughly 10% to 30%. They also caution that their corrected figure may itself represent a lower limit.
Ultimately, Mercury’s shrinking surface effectively records what has happened deep inside the planet.
The amount of contraction constrains how quickly Mercury lost heat, the thickness of its insulating regolith, the abundance of heat-producing elements, and even the composition and freezing history of its enormous metallic core. The revised estimate, for example, favors models involving a thinner regolith and lower sulfur content in Mercury’s core than some previous estimates.
Scientists may soon get a much sharper look.
The ESA-JAXA BepiColombo mission’s laser altimeter will eventually measure Mercury’s topography at scales as small as about 330 feet or 100 meters, possibly revealing geological relationships that MESSENGER could not resolve.
And Mercury may not be the only world whose geological record has been hiding in plain sight.
The Moon’s highlands are even rougher than Mercury’s cratered plains—by roughly 40% at the little-over 6-mile (10-kilometer) scale examined by the researchers. Yet evidence suggests the Moon contracted less than some thermal models estimate. If rough terrain similarly hides lunar faults, part of that difference might reflect structures scientists haven’t been able to see.
In other words, Mercury’s missing wrinkles may expose a wider problem in planetary geoscience. The more battered an ancient world becomes, the more effectively its later surface can erase the visible record of what happened before it.
“Investigating roughness alongside tectonic landforms may therefore refine our understanding of the lunar thermal evolution as well,” researchers conclude. “Mars could also be subject to this roughness effect, while topographic smoothing due to fluvial and aeolian processes may introduce more complex correlation between surface roughness and shortening structures.”
Study: Nishiyama, G., Broquet, A., Tosi, N., Preusker, F., Stark, A., Hussmann, H., & Hauber, E. “Underestimation of Planetary Contraction Due to Obscuration by Surface Roughness: The Case of Mercury.” Geophysical Research Letters 53, (2026).
Tim McMillan is a retired law enforcement executive, investigative reporter and co-founder of The Debrief. His writing typically focuses on defense, national security, the Intelligence Community and topics related to psychology. You can follow Tim on Twitter: @LtTimMcMillan. Tim can be reached by email: tim@thedebrief.org or through encrypted email: LtTimMcMillan@protonmail.com
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics scientists studying water ice believed to be stored in the Moon’s ‘pits of eternal darkness’ have concluded that there likely isn’t enough of this critical resource to support long-term future human colonies, meaning visions of large-scale cities on Earth’s largest natural satellite may be more science fiction than science fact.
Conversely, the researchers calculated that smaller settlements with fewer than 10,000 human colonists could have enough accessible water to survive for centuries. They also suggested that other technological advances in water harvesting or advances in scanning techniques that explore below the top few meters of surface regolith may reveal significant amounts of hidden lunar water.
The Moon’s surface is covered with visible evidence of asteroid collisions. Along with its textured appearance, some of these massive impact craters contain areas that are permanently shaded from direct sunlight.
The Harvard-Smithsonian research team behind the new study said some of the earliest “pits of eternal darkness” could be over one million years old. More critically, they can maintain a temperature of 110K, or just above absolute zero. At this low temperature, frozen water ice trapped in the sunless craters won’t lose more than a millimeter of thickness to space every billion years.
When announcing the new study, the researchers noted that “a succession of Moon-orbiting missions” has mapped out possible locations of stored water ice since 2013. The results suggested that the Moon’s pits of eternal darkness may contain as much as a billion tons, with the largest concentrated around the Moon’s northern and southern poles.
Since those missions, scientists and industrialists have begun to speculate about the viability of long-term human lunar habitation. Unlike astronauts trapped in capsules or space stations, lunar colonists could theoretically possess enough on-site water to support farming, full-service bathroom facilities, and production of hydrogen-based fuels.
Still, researchers wondered if one billion tons of stored water ice is enough to support the types of cities that billionaire industrialists and science fiction authors have proposed.
To start, the team modeled how long large human settlements ranging from 100,000 to one million people could survive on the water stored in lunar pits of eternal darkness. This included water-recycling rates up to 98%, as achieved on the International Space Station (ISS).
After running the numbers, the team found mixed results.
First, even colonies up to one million humans wouldn’t run out of power. The team said that number is based on solar power generation and excludes nuclear reactors.
Instead, the Harvard-Smithsonian team proposed constructing one-kilometer-tall solar energy towers near the rims of the craters. Their models suggest that an array of towers covered in photovoltaic arrays could generate three gigawatts of usable electricity.
The team noted that the materials needed to build solar panels, including the primary ingredient, silicon, are plentiful on the Moon, meaning future lunar colonists could manufacture new solar power-generating towers on-site. Such lunar colonists could theoretically maintain enormous AI data centers near these towers capable of servicing paying customers back on Earth.
“That would be the start of a true lunar economy,” the research team explained.
When the researchers crunched the water numbers, long-term lunar habitability became significantly more dubious. In fact, most estimates had future lunar colonists exhausting the most generous one-billion-ton projected supply of water ice within “a few years.”
When researchers modeled an ISS-level water recycling efficiency level using those same water estimates, a colony of one million humans would run out of water “in just over a century.”
“And today’s best estimates of the amount of water on the Moon are about 30 times less than a billion tons, shortening the time to water exhaustion by the same factor,” they add.
For example, if more conservative ‘pits of eternal darkness’ water ice estimates are closer to reality, the researchers said that “even a small city” likely wouldn’t make it past a decade before they had tapped the Moon dry.
Fortunately, the news was not all bad. When the team assumed a smaller “Moon village” of over one thousand people, up to a larger settlement of 10,000, the researchers found that the water ice stored in the Moon’s pits of eternal darkness “would instead be sustainable for several centuries or more.”
The team also suggested alternate solutions for supporting a larger, long-term lunar settlement. These included potential improvements in water recycling, improved farming efficiency, or mining nearby asteroids for water.
The team also noted that additional pockets of stored lunar water ice may be awaiting discovery, suggesting that finding such lunar water may be easier than achieving sufficient farming and recycling efficiency improvements.
“Current water surveying techniques do not reach below the surface more than a few meters, while the rubble-like rocks of the surface regolith typically extend tens of meters down and may contain water in the cold traps,” they explained.
The study “No Cities on the Moon: a Billion Tons of Water is not enough for Sustainability” was published in Frontiers in Space Technology.
Christopher Plain has spent the last six years as Associate News Editor and Head Science Reporter at The Debrief. Follow and connect with him on X, learn about his novels at plainfiction.com, or email him at christopher@thedebrief.org.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
We've been studying the moon for a long time. NASA has gathered mountains of data over decades of lunar missions and studies. The data collected by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) alone, for example, exceeds that of all NASA's other planetary missions combined.
Analyzing all this information takes lots of time and effort from researchers. So, NASA and IBM have developed an AI model to help sift through the moon data — an advance the agency announced on Thursday (Sept. 10). The open-source model, called the NASA-IBM Lunar Foundation Model, is currently available for free at Hugging Face.
"NASA has spent decades building an extraordinary scientific record of the moon, but collecting data is only part of the job," NASA's Kevin Murphy, chief science data officer and acting chief data and AI officer, said in the announcement.
The new AI model can help researchers with tasks like mapping craters, finding young volcanic features, and modeling possible locations of water ice near the lunar poles, according to NASA.
In the announcement, Murphy said that NASA needs to make scientific data easier to explore and use. To this end, NASA has been developing and releasing science-focused AI models with IBM. Previous models include one focused on Earth observation and another for heliophysics.
This is part of a larger trend of AI use in planetary science. Space agencies and private space companies around the world have been looking into how AI models can help with analysis to increase scientific productivity, reduce costs and streamline workflows.
"The NASA-IBM Lunar Foundation Model shows what's possible when we bring AI to NASA's petabytes of scientific data," Murphy said in the announcement. "That's a real opportunity we see with AI: turning large-scale data into new discoveries."
The AI model was mostly trained on data from the LRO mission. Over 17 years, NASA's lunar orbiter has compiled a nearly complete mosaic of images that detail the moon's surface in high definition.
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