Boreholes on moon to help estimate solar energy in the past

Scientists have calculated that boreholes on the moon just 10 metres deep would provide a temperature record stretching back to the 1600s, which would help researchers gauge solar energy in the past more accurately.

London, Jan 7 : Scientists have calculated that boreholes on the moon just 10 metres deep would provide a temperature record stretching back to the 1600s, which would help researchers gauge solar energy in the past more accurately.

Bob Cahalan at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and his colleagues made this estimation.

According to a report in New Scientist, earlier methods that climate modelers used to see how much solar energy reached Earth centuries ago, was using ice cores, tree rings and sunspot data.

Scientists also wanted to see from this method whether it had affected global temperatures or not.

But such methods were far from reliable; with incomplete sunspot data and conditions on Earth also skewing results.

Now, with 10 metre deep boreholes found on the surface of the moon, scientists would be able to measure solar energy more than 400 years back.

ANI