Getting humans into space is hard enough, but having them stay on another body for any length of time is even more challenging. When astronauts visited the moon in the Apollo missions, they lived in their spacecraft for the few days of their missions. But in the future NASA wants to send astronauts to visit places like the moon or Mars for longer — for periods of weeks or even months. That means they’ll need a home habitat of some kind to live in, perform research, and perhaps even grow crops.
Some suggestions for how to build lightweight habitats that are easier to transport include creating inflatable habitats or even growing habitats from fungus. But the most efficient option might be for astronauts to find locations that already exist where they can stay. That’s the hope of research into lava tubes — underground caves found on both the moon and Mars that were created by the movement of lava long ago.
Now, new research has identified a site that could one day house astronauts. Published in the journal Nature Astronomy, the researchers from the University of Trento in Italy have identified an open pit on the moon that they believe leads to an underground cave conduit system. They used radar data from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter to look at the deepest known pit on the moon, called the Mare Tranquillitatis Pit. Particular readings from this suggest that there is a conduit coming off the bottom of the pit that is between 30 and 80 meters long and around 45 meters wide.
“This discovery suggests that the [Mare Tranquillitatis Pit] is a promising site for a lunar base, as it offers shelter from the harsh surface environment and could support long-term human exploration of the Moon,” the authors write.
They also write that lava tubes could be common features found beneath lunar plains, so there could be many other suitable locations for astronaut bases located just beneath the moon’s surface. Around 200 lunar pits have been found to date, and researching these further using this radar methodology could help to identify which ones could be potentially useful locations for astronauts to shelter from the extreme temperatures and other difficult conditions of the moon’s surface.
