The Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) has announced the discovery of a “giant underground chamber” not far from the Lunar equator. The mysterious chamber is located in the Oceanus Procellarum region of the Moon.
The gigantic, sublunar cavern was spotted by India’s Chandrayaan-1 space probe.
The Indian researchers, in a paper published in a recent issue of Current Science, describe their discovery: the chamber is a whopping one mile long and almost 400 feet wide. Some theorize the underground chamber leads to a deep tunnel more than 1,200 feet wide.
This latest lunar oddity is nothing new. Strange formations, objects and phenomena have been observed on the Moon for several hundred years. Astronomers have reported seeing odd lights, moving objects, geological formations that abruptly disappeared and other weird anomalies.
Space researcher Richard C. Hoagland has built a career, a series of books, a website and a busy guest lecture tour around the anomalies he sees on the Moon, Mars and some of the outer planet’s satellites. His primary focus is on Mars.
But the Moon is not Mars. Humans have set foot on the Moon. Explored a bit of it with electric cars—even played a round of golf on it.
Can strange, gigantic chambers really pockmark Earth’s satellite? Where do they lead? Are they natural or artificial?
No one really knows.
The consensus of scientific thought is that the chambers, caves and deep holes have been formed mostly by ancient lava domes and flows.
Most astronomers agree. And the ISRO is not the first to find such a strange chamber. During 2009, the Japanese Space Agency JAXA excitedly announced their lunar probe Kaguy photographed a hole in the Moon so large and deep they believed it could someday house a manned scientific base.
The Russians too have reported holes and cavernous features during the heyday of Lunar probes throughout the 1960s and early 1970s.
The Indians—as well as past research projects funded by the U.S. and former U.S.S.R.—see the potential to use such holes and caverns as areas to build permanent lunar cities and towns. They would be protected from solar flares, ongoing radiation, and micrometeorite impacts.
Silicon India reports that the scientists at the Space Applications Center in Ahmedabad have stated the chamber affords natural protection and “a safe environment from hazardous radiations, micro-meteor impacts, extreme temperatures and dust storms.”
Holes, caverns and lava tube chambers “…provide a natural environmental control with a nearly constant temperature of minus 20 degrees Celsius, unlike that of the lunar surface showing extreme variation, maximum of 130 degrees Celsius to a minimum of minus 180 degrees Celsius in its diurnal (day-night) cycle,” they explained.
The Indian scientists believe finding and mapping the locations of such geological features is important for future exploration and exploitation of the Moon’s resources.
So what are these chambers and where to they lead? Are all natural, or as some of the wilder theories out there suggest, are some signs of alien intelligence?
Researcher Mark Robinson, of Arizona State University, during an interview with news.com.au said, “They could be entrances to a geologic wonderland.”
