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IPFS News Link • Space Travel and Exploration

Moon colonization – many lava tube caves, water and high amounts of titanium

• nextbigfuture.com by brian wang

The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has now imaged over 200 pits that show the signature of being skylights into subsurface voids or caverns, ranging in diameter from about 16 feet (5 meters) to more than 2,950 feet (900 meters), although some of these are likely to be post-flow features rather than volcanic skylights.

There is a Sinuous of collapse pits transitioning into a continuous uncollapsed segment of a lunar lava tube. The chain is about 50 km long.

Inflatable module with a hard outer shell could be placed into tubes and they would be designed to seal the openings.

Any intact lava tube on the Moon could serve as a shelter from the severe environment of the Lunar surface, with its frequent meteorite impacts, high-energy ultra-violet radiation and energetic particles, and extreme diurnal temperature variations.


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