Did the COVID-19 lockdowns really affect lunar temperatures?

Almost five years ago, much of the world went quiet for several weeks due to the COVID-19 lockdowns. It went so quiet, in fact, that scholars published a 2024 article in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society: Letters claiming the lack of human activity likely led to the moon’s surface temperatures cooling down in April and May of 2020.

But researchers from Missouri S&T and the University of West Indies (UWI) in St. Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago, are now challenging those findings in a new article published this year in that same journal.

“When one of my colleagues first showed me this article written by the other researchers, we both wondered—could this be real?” says Dr. William Schonberg, a Missouri S&T professor of civil engineering who has researched space-related topics for almost four decades.

“The idea that our activity, or lack of activity, on Earth would have significant influence on the temperatures of the moon—which is almost 240,000 miles from us—didn’t seem likely, but we decided to keep an open mind and conduct additional research.”

The authors in the initial study last year used data from NASA’s Diviner Lunar Radiometer Experiment aboard the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter to analyze lunar surface temperatures from 2017 to 2023, which led to them identifying a significant drop in temperature during the COVID-19 lockdowns.

Schonberg and Dr. Shirin Haque, a professor of physics at UWI, took that study’s general methods a step further and did a more detailed analysis of the same data. They looked at the temperature trends and then ran further statistical analyses based off what they saw.

“We approached the data with more detail and really dug into the numbers,” Schonberg says. “And we found that the 2020 temperature dip actually began earlier in 2019, so that means it predated the lockdowns.”

He says there was another significant temperature dip in 2018 as well, which was almost two years before the start of the pandemic.

“We’re not disputing that the temperatures did go down at different times during the timeframe studied,” he says. “But it seems to be a bit of a stretch to state with any certainty that human activity was the primary cause of this.”

Although Schonberg and Haque’s research shows the COVID lockdowns were not necessarily the driving factor behind the changing lunar temperatures, Schonberg says activity on Earth can potentially have some effect, although it would likely be minimal.

“During the moon’s nighttime, there is a small possibility that heat and radiation from Earth might have a very small effect on the lunar surface temperatures,” he says. “But this influence would probably be so minimal that it would be difficult to measure or even notice.”