- When NASA's Apollo astronauts landed on the moon, they drilled probes into the ground to monitor the moon's temperature.
- Apollo mission researchers later noticed that the probes recorded peculiar warming on the surface of the moon.
- New data suggests that by walking around and poking into the lunar surface, the astronauts themselves changed the temperature on the moon.
The new records suggest the moon's surface temperature in the areas studied rose by roughly 3 to 6 degrees Fahrenheit (1.6 degrees to 3.5 degrees Celsius). Shallower probes recorded greater temperature increases than deeper ones and also heated up more quickly. That suggests the warming must have come from something on the moon's surface, not a casing or a natural phenomenon.
The study suggests that the act of driving rovers and walking on the moon turned up some darker moon dust called regolith. Since darker materials absorb more light, the exposure of this darker dust most likely prompted the moon's surface to heat up.
"In the process of installing the instruments, you may actually end up disturbing the surface thermal environment of the place where you want to make some measurements," the lead study author and geophysicist Seiichi Nagihara, a planetary scientist at Texas Tech University, told the American Geophysical Union blog
GeoSpace.