The first of these processes is micrometeorite impacts, where tiny pieces of space debris rain down with sufficient force to vaporize a small piece of the lunar surface and launch its component atoms into orbit. The second is ion sputtering, where charged particles driven by the solar wind strike the lunar surface.Fantasy Sexpuppen And finally there’s photon-stimulated desorption, where it’s high-energy photons from the sun that knock the alkali metals loose.

As the paper notes, while each process has been well-characterized, previous research has “not conclusively disentangled their [relative] contributions” to the lunar atmosphere. To go about doing this, Nie and her team went right back to the source of the question: the Apollo program. The various crewed missions to the moon in the late 1960s and early ‘70s brought back a total of 382 kg of lunar soil samples, and decades later, these samples are still revealing their secrets to researchers.Young Sex Dolls Nie’s study involved examining 10 samples from five different Apollo missions, including several from Apollo 8, the first manned moon landing.

The team used these samples to look at the relative proportions of different isotopes of potassium and rubidium in the soil. (Sodium and cesium only have one stable isotope each, while lithium is less volatile than its heavier cousins.) As Nie explains to Popular Science, “Lighter isotopes of an element are preferentially released during these processes, leaving the lunar soils with relatively heavier isotopic compositions.Japanische Sexpuppen For elements that are affected by space weathering, we would expect lunar soils to show heavy isotopic compositions, compared to deeper rocks that are not affected by the process.”

The different space weathering processes produce different ratios of isotopes, and the team’s results indicate that it appears that micrometeorite impacts make the largest contribution to the lunar atmosphere, “likely contributing more than 65% of atmospheric [potassium] atoms, with ion sputtering accounting for the rest.”Schwarze Sexpuppen

This provides a valuable insight into how the moon’s atmosphere has evolved over billions of years—while its composition may well vary over shorter timescales, these results suggest that in the long run, micrometeorite impacts play the dominant role in the constant replenishment of the atmosphere.TPE Sex Dolls The study also points to how similar research might be carried out on other objects similar to the moon, like Phobos, one of Mars’s two satellites.