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J. K. Wilson, S. M. Smith, J. Baumgardner, M. Mendillo (Boston University)
We have made the first detections of the distant lunar sodium tail with an all-sky camera on the nights of August 21-22 and November 18-20, 1998. The lunar sodium tail represents the escaping component of the lunar sodium atmosphere, which is generated from the Moon’s regolith by a combination of surface processes. On nights near new Moon, the sodium tail appears in the sky as a spot near the anti-solar point; the location and morphology of this spot are consistent with standard models of the Moon's atmosphere. We interpret the changing brightness of the spot from night to night using a new time-dependent model of the lunar atmosphere, and we find that the atomic sodium escape rate from the Moon temporarily increased by a factor of 2 to 3 during the most intense period of the 1998 Leonid meteor shower on November 16 and 17. This is the most significant meteor-related atmospheric enhancement yet observed, and it may help to quantify the contribution of micrometeor bombardment to the lunar atmosphere.
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