Bangalore, September 25: This is a revolutionary finding that could spur space scientists on to look for possibility of life in the lunar environs. US’s National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa) has detected traces of water across the entire surface of the Moon.
The path-breaking finding was made using Nasa’s payload on board India’s first unmanned moon-bound space craft, Chandrayaan-1. DNA had first reported (May 22 edition) that Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) and Nasa had “for the first time found sure-fire hints of presence of water on the Moon”.
With the finding, which was made public on Thursday, speculation among the scientific community over the possibility of water on the Moon has been put to rest. The results were published in the journal Science. The report detailed the findings from the Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3), the Nasa instrument on board Chandrayaan-1.
The M3 detected molecules of water and hydroxyl. A water molecule consists of two atoms of hydrogen and one of oxygen, while that of hydroxyl carries one of each. Until now, the scientific community believed that oxygen never existed on the Moon, but know for sure that helium, a form of hydrogen, exists on the lunar surface.
While the expanse of the water is not precisely known, a Brown University release stated that 1,000 water molecule parts-per-million could be in the lunar soil.
This means that harvesting one ton of the top layer of the moon’s surface could yield 32 ounces of water (around one litre).
The M3 team also found water molecules and hydroxyl at various areas of the sunlit region of the moon’s surface, but the water marks appeared stronger at the moon’s higher latitudes.
The M3 discovery is confirmed by data from two earlier Nasa spacecrafts — the Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (Vims) on the Cassini spacecraft and the High-Resolution Infrared Imaging Spectrometer on the EPOXI spacecraft.
The M3 was developed by a Brown University team, under the supervision of geological sciences professor, Carle Pieters, who is the principal investigator of the M3 instrument.
Peter Isaacson, a Brown University team member, said M3’s result is a huge surprise. “There was no evidence that this was possible (water on the Moon) on such a broad scale,” he said. “This discovery turns a lot of the conventional thinking about the lunar surface on its head.”
–Agencies–