From the Planetary Society's Blog: what would a terraformed Moon look like?
Bright as heck too irl. IIRC, the moon reflects single digit amounts of light. The Earth does about 40%. You are looking at as much as a 10x increase in light from the Moon now.
Bright as heck too irl. IIRC, the moon reflects single digit amounts of light. The Earth does about 40%. You are looking at as much as a 10x increase in light from the Moon now.
Very,very awesome. Perhaps that will be the night sky in a few thousand years?
ReplyDeleteTerraforming Luna would require a lot of work though. Luna's rotation would have to be sped up to around 12 to 36 hours a lunar day. Adding mass would be a good thing, though even the Moon's gravity at .16 of Earth's is strong enough to keep an atmosphere of 6-7 Bars* without significant loss for around a billion years.
Although the Moon doesn't have much of magnetosphere, the new thickened atmosphere will quickly develop an ionosphere. That will practically halt atmosphere loss on it's own and have the added benefit of protecting Lunans from the Sun and most cosmic rays.
Interestingly enough, having this new atmosphere, coupled with oceans and microbial life, the moon will probably "wake up" geologically within a few million years. That time might see the development of nascent tectonics and a much stronger magnetosphere.
*you need that much to achieve Earth-normal 1 Bar equivalent at lunar sea-level.
I want to be a Lunan!!!!! That would be so F*cken awesome! You would get to the giant, shining earth every "night" also.
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