Gas emissions from Lunite civilization? The aliens that created us millions of years ago? I read the Nazi underground base in Antarctica has been in communication with them and the dust is actually being used as a type of mind control antennae through which their minions are preparing to take over our civilization.

Kidding aside, I am wondering what kind of useful application this phenomenon could have. I know that terrestrial communication is possible by bouncing signals using meteorite trails. I wonder if heating up this cloud with microwaves or applying some form of magnetic field might be useful in some way. Perhaps there is even a way to harvest energy from these particles.

As for TLP, dust emissions could possibly explain some of them (i.e., impact ejecta), but the slowly moving lights and glows that make up the classic TLP phenomena seem to be very “un-dustlike.” I suspect many of them to be observer effects (e.g., lens flare) although gas emissions from the interior are certainly possible.

One is the boulder tracks and retroreflectors. It seems that both should have been covered by dust if the amount lofted is appreciable. For boulder tracks, they “should” have happened long time ago (>20Myr). Track erosion has been estimated at 2-8 cm/million years, but this excludes dust, although that seems a part of the estimate they did not mention in the analysis. If dust contributed 100% to the erosion, this suggests a tiny amount of dust in the space around the Moon at any specific time. Also, the retroreflectors still seem to work for both Apollo and Lunokhod. I would have thought the dust would cover them too so the dust must be very very sparse.

Second, how does the “transient lunar phenomena” enter into the picture? Are TLPs geysers of volatiles/dust ejected into lunar space?

Finally, anomalies in the various laser altimeter experiments. It seems that there have been a number of erroneous data points in the data sets. This includes the Apollo data and LRO data (I have not examined Kaguya in detail). I can see how the Apollo data would be somewhat flaky due to the laser being a new device. LRO is a little different. Could LRO’s LOLA possibly detect this dusty environment? The scientists state that they never expected any returns from dust, only a weaker signal return and it’s not clear if LOLA is affected by the dust. But it would be interesting to try to correlate the “spurious” signals when LOLA has bounced a signal off the surface as it passes the terminator. A nice graduate student activity. I know if you take a low power laser and shine it into the air, the dust is highly illuminated.