Scientists reportedly discovered a 100 meter-deep cave on the Moon that could one day be a home for humans, saying there could be many more in an "underground, undiscovered world."
Helen Sharman, the first Brit to become an astronaut, said the cave looked like a good place for humans to live were they to need a base on the Moon, according to BBC . In her eyes, humans would have no problem setting up camp in lunar pits in 20 to 30 years. However, the cave's depth may pose a problem for leaving, which Helen said would require abseil to enter and "jet packs or a lift" to exit.
The biggest roadblock to establishing a permanent human presence on the Moon is safety—countries will need to protect their astronauts from dangerous temperatures, space weather and radiation.
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Lorenzo Bruzzone and Leonardo Carrer of the University of Trento in Italy discovered the cave by using radar to penetrate the Mare Tranquillitatis, which denotes a pit on a rocky plain. The "mare" or sea was hypothesized to have once been an ocean and is visible to the naked eye from Earth.
It is also where Apollo 11 landed in 1969. The cave includes a skylight on the Moon's surface and leads down to parallel walls and a sloping floor that may or may not descend even farther underground. It was created millions or billions of years ago when lava flowed through the rock, creating a tunnel.
Professor Carrer said the closest equivalent on Earth would be the volcanic caves in Spain, which he has visited as part of his research. “It’s really exciting. When you make these discoveries and you look at these images, you realise you’re the first person in the history of humanity to see it,” Prof Carrer said.
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Professor Bruzzone and Professor Carrer realized the cave would a make a suitable base for human life once discovered it considerable size. “After all, life on Earth began in caves, so it makes sense that humans could live inside them on the Moon,” said Prof Carrer.
The cave's full contents haven't been explored but the scientists are poised to inquire with ground-penetrating radar, cameras or even robots. Moon caves were hypothesized about 50 years ago. The theory was tested in 2010 with a camera on a mission called the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which captured images of pits that researchers thought could be cave entrances.
Scientists took precautions, however, as the depths of the caves were unknown and they might collapse. Professors Bruzzone and Carrer have finally answered that question and plan to dive deeper into their work to uncover the full scale of the cave.
“We have very good images of the surface - up to 25cm of resolution - we can see the Apollo landing sites - but we know nothing about what lies below the surface. There are huge opportunities for discovery,” Francesco Sauro, Coordinator of the Topical Team Planetary Caves of the European Space Agency, said.
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