Water on Moon: Confirmed

Man has been searching far and wide across the universe for any signs of water when all along there it was on the body nearest to our planet. No, i am not talking about Mars but our very own, the Moon! Strange but amazing, when man first stepped on the moon and brought the soil samples back to Earth, the scientists believed that the Moon was a bone dry and barren place with no evidence of traces of water. But amazingly now after 40 years since man first stepped on the moon, the evidence from three different spacecrafts confirmed that there are traces of water on the surface of the moon and it is believed that the polar regions might also contain frozen water thus bringing the theory of moon being bone dry to an end.

This discovery of water came just weeks before the impact of LCROSS which will further prove the existence of water by impacting the probe on the shadowed regions of the south pole of the Moon. The Moon is drier than any desert on the Earth and it is believed that the water on the moon is so less that 1 ton of the soil would hold just about 32 ounces of water. Data indicates that water exists diffusely across the moon as hydroxyl or water molecules or both; adhering to the surface in low concentrations. But still,there’s more water on the Moon than originally thought.

During the Apollo missions starting from Apollo 11, the evidence brought to Earth showed a bizarre image to the scientists that moon is totally a dead grey object where any traces of water are just 0%. At first the scientists discovered some water minerals on the rock samples brought from the moon, but then it was believed that the samples got contaminated when they were brought to the earth and the prospect of there being water on the Moon was dismissed.

The first signs of water were discovered when the spacecraft Cassini passed by the Moon in 1999 on it’s way to Saturn. The spacecraft showed signs of water/hydroxyl by sending signals from it’s own censors meant for the analysis of Saturn and it’s moon. The spacecraft showed traces of water near the poles of the Moon in ice form and because of this NASA prepared mission of LCROSS believing that only the poles might contain water.

The second probe Chandrayaan-1, India’s first lunar spacecraft, detected traces of hydroxyl across the surface of the moon. The instruments on board Chandrayaan-1 the Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3), found the infra-red light was being absorbed at the lunar poles at wavelengths consistent with hydroxyl- and water-bearing materials. M3 analysed the sunlight and detected wavelengths of reflected light that would indicate a chemical bond between hydrogen and oxygen.

This mosaic, taken from a NASA animation, shows altitude measurements of the moon's south pole from the LOLA instrument aboard the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. Some craters, including Cabeus A that will be hit by the LCROSS probe, are named in this view released Sept. 17, 2009. Credit: NASA/GSFC

Finally, the reports came to an end conclusion when the spacecraft Deep Impact probe, on its way to rendezvous with another comet in 2010, detected signs of water at all latitudes above 10 degrees N, though once again, the poles showed the strongest signals. To confirm it, the probe orbited the moon multiple times and the results were the same; traces of water near the polar region.

But where did the water come from?. To answer this the scientists concluded that not only is the moon hydrated, the process that makes it so is a dynamic one that is driven by the daily changes in solar radiation hitting any given spot on the surface. There are two possibilities of water arriving to the Moon; one is that the water might have come from a passing by comet and second is that that it may have originated on the moon itself. If the charged hydrogen’s, which are travelling at one-third the speed of light, hit the lunar surface with enough force, they break apart oxygen bonds in soil materials, the M3 team members suspect. Where free oxygen and hydrogen exist, there is a high chance that trace amounts of water will form.

An illustration showing the stream of charged hydrogen ions carried from the sun to the moon by the solar wind. Scientists think this process might explain the possible presence of hydroxyl or water on the moon. Credit: University of Maryland/F. Merlin/McREL

Courtesy: Space.com & Universe Today

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