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You’ve gotta love space art! I think this NASA artwork is telling what NASA plans to do 100 years from now (not FY20!), since it will be 100 years before the Moon looks like this. I mean—obviously—the Moon in this picture has a very thick atmosphere. We can tell because.../1
2/...the rocket exhaust is in a narrow column and it is emitting yellow light. Rocket exhausts look that way on Earth in our thick atmosphere, but on the Moon (like it is today) with no atmosphere the rocket exhaust spreads out to fill the entire hemisphere beneath the lander...
3/Because it spreads out so much, that means it gets very cool. The low temperature means that chemical reactions can’t occur any more, so it doesn’t produce light. And the gas molecules aren’t colliding so much that they vibrate then give off the vibration energy as light. So...
4/ Rocket exhaust in the vacuum of space is invisible. On Earth rocket exhausts are bright because they are still under pressure in Earth’s atmosphere and therefore they stay hot, driving both chemical reactions and vibration/rotation of “hot” molecules that give off photons.
5/ Also, in this picture the busted up debris coming off the lander is blowing away in a horizontal sheet. That tells us the gas is flowing along the surface of the lander deck as a boundary layer flow. That doesn’t happen in a vacuum...
6/...at least not quite to this extreme. You can see in the Apollo launches that the debris shoots in every direction, not in a flat sheet. (Pictures from Apollo 15 & 17.)
7/ It will take 100 years or more of releasing gas on the Moon before its atmosphere is this thick! At first the gas we release on the Moon escapes to space very quickly. It is almost instantly lost in the solar wind. But after enough rocket launches a thick atmosphere will...
8/...form, and then only the upper layers can directly escape to space do it will be 100s of years for it to decay away again. (This is one reason NASA flew the LADEE mission — to study the natural lunar atmosphere before it gets overwhelmed by rocket exhaust.) Also,...
9/...in this picture we see dust is not lifting off the ground. But in vacuum, the gas goes around the corners of the lander deck and hits the ground, raising dust almost instantaneously. A raised pad like this only stops dust in an atmosphere (unless you know the secret tech 🤓)
10/ Also, we can tell from this picture that the Moon’s thick atmosphere is NOT made from rocket exhaust. It was an artificial atmosphere created intentionally! Rocket exhaust forms by combustion adding fuel & oxidizer molecules. The result is gas molecules that are oxidized...
11/...typically H2O (water, i.e., oxidized hydrogen) and CO2 (oxidized carbon). Polyatomic molecules like that are able to scatter light very effectively. Our Earth’s atmosphere is mostly polyatomic (N2), and do it scatters sunlight, and so the sky is blue in the daytime. But...
12/ ...in this picture the shadows are sharp and angle down from above, so it is daytime, and yet we can see the stars, even the Milky Way! So this seems to be (most likely) a thick atmosphere of some noble gas like Argon or Neon.
13/ Also its kinda weird how the rocket has lifted off about the same distance its debris has traveled. If you’ve ever seen rockets take off you’ll know the debris shoots far away before the rocket hardly moves at all. Here’s @Ryan_N_Watkins measuring debris shot from STS-124.
14/ And in the Apollo Lunar Module launches the debris shoots far away before the higher inertia of the Lunar Module had responded much. This tells us the spacecraft in the concept art has super low inertia, like it is not made of normal matter, but of future exotic matter!
15/ Also, to leap off the pad so quickly it would have killed any humans inside from the acceleration, and yet there are windows on it. So it must be inhabited by robots made of the same non-inertial matter. Now at last the Moon’s future is starting to form a coherent picture.
16/ Creating a thick atmosphere provides radiation shielding, which is good for both biological organisms & for electronic circuits, but biologicals can’t breathe a noble gas. So it was created for the robots! Apparently the Moon is inhabited by robots 100 years from now. And...
17/17 ... we had better quit since we have already revealed too many government secrets.
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