Hole as big as city block found on Moon

William Atkins
Saturday, 02 January 2010 19:18

Science - Space

A Japanese led team of researchers has found a large, dark pit on the near side of the Moon that is "as big as a city block and deep as a modest skyscraper." Probably created billions of years ago, it is considered by the scientists to be a collapsed lava tube.


Lava tubes are natural passageways through which lava travels beneath the surface of a lava flow. They are expelled by a volcano during an eruption.

Lava tubes are common on Earth, but have never before been found on the Moon. However, they have been conjectured to exist by astronomers in the past. One, now, has been found on the Moon.

The article highlighting this discovery is titled “Possible lunar lava tube skylight observed by SELENE cameras.”

It was published in the October 2009 issue of the journal Geophysical Research Letters (J. Haruyama, et al. (2009), Possible lunar lava tube skylight observed by SELENE cameras, Geophys. Res. Lett., 36, L21206, doi:10.1029/2009GL040635)

The research was lead by Dr. Junichi Haruyama, the senior researcher for the Terrain Camera Team of the Kaguya (SELENE) mission. Haruyama is also an assistant professor in the Department of Planetary Science at the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science (ISAS), which is part of the Japanese space agency Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA).

The SELENE mission to the Moon was launched on September 14, 2007, from the Tanegashima Space Center (TNSC) in Japan.

The Haruyama-led team stated in the abstract to their paper, “We discovered a vertical hole on the Moon, which is a possible lava tube skylight, using data from SELENE's two high-resolution cameras: the Terrain Camera and the Multi-band Imager.”

Page two continues with further descriptions of the lunar lava tube.