How Moon's Dust Cloud Could Impact Future Space Travel

— -- The discovery of an ever-changing, lopsided lunar cloud of dust could have implications for future manned missions in space.

A cloud of dust around the moon was discovered using data from a detection tool on board NASA's Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer.

A paper detailing the research was published this week in the journal "Nature."

Knowing where dust is in space could help mitigate harm to astronauts and equipment on future manned missions to other planets and asteroids, according to Mihaly Horanyi, a researcher at the University of Colorado Boulder who worked on the study.

"Identifying this permanent dust cloud engulfing the moon was a nice gift from this mission," Horanyi said in a statement. "We can carry these findings over to studies of other airless planetary objects like the moons of other planets and asteroids."

When something as small as a single dust particle from a passing comet hits the moon's surface, it can send thousands of dust specks into the lunar cloud, according to the study.

Researchers noted the lunar cloud increases in density around the time of annual events such as the Geminids meteor shower.

A mysterious glow was first noticed in the 1960s from a NASA unmanned spacecraft and again during the Apollo mission, however the latest findings are discrepant from the astronauts' reports of a thicker, higher cloud of dust, leading researchers to conclude conditions then may have been slightly different.