Kaz felt a little like she was treating him as a know-nothing, but was also glad for the refresher. And this was a good way to build rapport with the scientists.
“One other thing before I get to your question,” Laura said. “The Man in the Moon—the darker shapes you see—those are ancient lava flows. The light gray rock of the crust is anorthosite, and the darker areas are basalt. Also, the Moon is tidally locked. Do you know what that means?”
That Kaz didn’t know. He shook his head.
“It means that the same side of the Moon always faces us. Only twenty-four humans—all Apollo astronauts—have seen the other side.”
“Why always the same side?” Kaz asked.
“The Earth’s gravity pulls hard enough on the Moon that it bulges a little towards us, like a stone tide going up and down. That internal friction, over time, slowed the Moon’s spin, until eventually it got to perfect balance. Presto—we only see the one side.”
Kaz held up his hands, slowly turning an imaginary Moon. “So what causes the lunar phases?”
“The Moon orbits around the Earth every 27.3 days. Depending on where the Moon is in its slow orbit, you might see it lit from the side—a crescent—or not at all.”
“So, if the Moon spins just once every 27 days or so,” Kaz said, “then an astronaut on the surface would be in sunlight for two weeks, and then darkness for two weeks?”
Laura beamed at him. “Yes!”
“How hot and cold does it get, then?”
“About two hundred and sixty degrees Fahrenheit at lunar noon, and minus two hundred and eighty at midnight.”
Kaz whistled. “Good to know.”
A man in a Hawaiian shirt and Elvis Presley sideburns, the look spoiled slightly by premature balding, spoke up. “Hi, Kaz, I’m Don Baldwin, the department head here. I’ve been thinking about your question about what we’ve learned recently. There’s a couple things.” He ran a hand over his head, front to back, flattening down his remaining hair. “Some of the more recent asteroid impacts blasted pretty deep holes that haven’t been covered by dust yet. They’d be a good place to study the underlying rock, to a depth we haven’t been able to drill. We’ll need to dig into our photo library at your revised coordinates to see if there are any new craters nearby.”
Baldwin paused a moment to look hard at Kaz. His unspoken message was clear. His people hadn’t chosen the location, but they’d make the best of it.
“There’s another thing we’re interested in. Laura, there”—Baldwin nodded at her—“spotted something surprising recently. Laura, why don’t you tell him about it?”
She looked at Kaz. “A weird anomaly caught my eye as I was studying some high-res images of the surface, like a dark spot on the film. I had to double-check with a magnifying glass to be sure what I was seeing. But I found a hole in the Moon.”
“What?”
“It looks to be a good size, maybe a hundred yards across.” Laura flipped through her folder on the table. “I have a picture with me.”
She passed an eight-by-ten black-and-white photo down the table to Kaz. He studied the glossy page with his good eye.
It looked like . . . a hole. Almost perfectly round, with the bottom partially lit by the angle of the sunshine. Like something had drilled a skylight.
Kaz looked up in puzzlement. “What made this?”
Laura deferred to her boss.
“We don’t know for sure,” Baldwin said. “If it was on Earth, our best guess would be a collapsed lava tube, where flowing magma bored a tunnel that later caved in. But how that could happen on the Moon is beyond us. We’re forming theories.”
Kaz peered closer. “How deep do you think it is?”
Laura answered this one. “We need more photos to be sure, but knowing the angle of the Sun at that time of the lunar day, our guess is, pretty deep—like a hundred yards.”
Kaz looked at the hole with new respect.
“If you jumped in, with the Moon’s low gravity, you’d slowly fall for eleven seconds. But you’d hit the bottom at forty miles per hour.” She smiled. “I did the math.”
Chad spoke again. “Yeah, I know I’m just the backup, but let’s not try that. Hard on the suit.”
Kaz handed the photo back to her. “So, you’d all like to see a cross-section of bedrock in a recent impact crater, and learn more about this hole. Are there more of them?”
“Probably,” Baldwin said. “We’re going back through all the photos. It took Laura’s sharp eyes to spot this one, but now we know what we’re looking for.”