04/15/2009 - The Dynamic Lunar Environment

Jasper Halekas, UC Berkeley Space Sciences Laboratory The lunar environment, serene and unchanging to the naked eye, seethes with plasma and electromagnetic activity. Plasma, photons, micrometeorites and energetic particles constantly bombard the lunar surface, producing a tenuous exosphere and a dynamic wake region, and charging the surface to electrostatic potentials reaching kilovolts, producing surface electric fields large enough to affect lunar ions and dust. Meanwhile, plasma interacts directly with crustal magnetic fields, producing perhaps the smallest magnetospheres in the solar system. Dr. Halekas will talk about how the Moon provides an ideal laboratory to study a variety of fundamental physics processes which are both interesting in their own right, and potentially applicable to Mars and other planets in the solar system. play video

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04/15/2009 - The Dynamic Lunar Environment is an episode from SETI Institute Colloquium Series Videos.

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This episode was published on Apr 27, 2009.

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