![]() ![]() “The moon has been important planetary science since day one, that hasn’t changed. “The moon has the history and evolution of our solar system written on its surface, if we can get there,” says Jim Green, NASA director of planetary science. “Now we want to go back and sample these ancient terrains," says Needham.Īlready, NASA is working with scientists to fulfill their lunar ambitions. ![]() They want to know what kind of material might still be there from the early days of the solar system. NASA scientists are also interested in the South Pole-Aitken Basin, which is the moon's biggest and oldest impact crater. Needham and others believe there may be areas there that have ice, for example. Proving it, for Needham and her colleagues, means going to places on the moon that were never explored by the Apollo astronauts in the 1960s and 1970s-including the far side of the moon where radio communication with Earth is more difficult. ![]() “I’m saying that it happened,” Needham says. Building on Earthly observations of gas-releasing lavas, her work suggests that the moon's atmosphere could have formed when surface volcanoes belched out gases that settled onto pockets of cooling rock-a volcanic smog that may have lasted 70 million years before dissipating. Needham studies how volcanic activity formed the rocky bodies-Mercury, Venus, Mars, Earth, and the moon-and this month she published a paper hypothesizing that the moon may have had a hazy atmosphere. “I’m excited to get boots back on the ground,” says Debra Needham, a planetary scientist at the Marshall Space Flight Center. And these days, they're about as giddy as lunar scientists can get. These scientists hope to piggyback onto any future US moonshot so they can answer questions about the origin of the solar system, as well as test the kind of experiments they hope to run on Mars. Pence didn’t give a date, details, or even a ballpark cost during his speech at the opening of the National Space Council.īut he did give a morale boost to 200 attendees (a record) at NASA’s Lunar Exploration Advisory Group, which held its annual meeting this week in Columbia, Md. NASA responded on Twitter, saying that it was actually no problem that Pence had touched it because it was about to be cleaned anyway.īecause this picture was taken in 2017 (long before the new coronavirus outbreak) and NASA made a public statement indicating no harm was done, we rate this claim "Outdated.At the beginning of the month, Vice President Mike Pence announced that the US, at long last, will go back to the moon. Marco Rubio, who can be seen standing behind him, "dared" him to touch the equipment. One day after his visit, Pence tweeted an apology to NASA, along with a joke that U.S. Pence was indeed photographed touching the equipment during his visit to the the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA) Kennedy Space Center in Florida on July 6, 2017. However, in regards to the subject matter of the above tweet, it is outdated. The Twitter user's name has been cropped out for privacy reasons: As headlines warned the outbreak could become a pandemic, people shared the picture along with jokes riffing off criticism that Pence was unqualified to lead the nation's response to the quickly spreading virus that can be passed on through touch.įor example, this tweet was posted on Feb. The picture was from July 2017, but social media users shared it anew after Pence was tapped to lead the Trump administration's efforts to combat an outbreak of COVID-19, the disease caused by a new coronavirus. Vice President Mike Pence touching a piece of space equipment that bore a "DO NOT TOUCH" sign. In early March 2020, Snopes readers asked us to verify a photograph that appeared to show U.S. ![]()
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