Moon once had an atmosphere: NASA study

The Moon had an atmosphere about three to four billion years ago, when intense volcanic eruptions spewed gases above the surface faster than they could escape to space, a NASA study has found.
When one looks up at the Moon, dark surfaces of volcanic basalt can be easily seen to fill large impact basins. Those seas of basalt, known as maria, erupted while the interior of the Moon was still hot and generating magmatic plumes that sometimes breached the lunar surface and flowed for hundreds of kilometers.

Analyses of lunar samples indicate those magmas carried gas components, such as carbon monoxide, the ingredients for water, sulfur, and other volatile species. Researchers, from NASA and Lunar and Planetary Institute in the US, calculated the amounts of gases that rose from the erupting lavas as they flowed over the surface and showed that those gases accumulated around the Moon to form a transient atmosphere.

The atmosphere was thickest during the peak in volcanic activity about 3.5 billion years ago and, when created, would have persisted for about 70 million years before being lost to space. The two largest pulses of gases were produced when lava seas filled the Serenitatis and Imbrium basins about 3.8 and …read more