When was water discovered on the moon

If they do contain ice, it means water is going to be more accessible than previously assumed. SOFIA will look for water in additional sunlit locations to learn more about how the water is produced, stored, and moved across the Moon. Click here to join our channel indianexpress and stay updated with the latest headlines. Mehr Gill Kabir Firaque Kabir Firaque, a newsroom veteran of three decades, has been part of T What can these findings mean for Moon explorers?

Why is the discovery of water important? What was known about water on the Moon? Coronavirus Explained. Click here for more. The Indian Express website has been rated GREEN for its credibility and trustworthiness by Newsguard, a global service that rates news sources for their journalistic standards.

At the poles the Sun hovers close to the horizon. Large craters with terraced rims block sunlight from ever reaching inside. These areas are called permanently shadowed regions, or PSRs. PSRs are known to exist on other low-gravity, airless worlds too, like Mercury and Ceres. Water-bearing comets and asteroids have bombarded our inner solar system multiple times throughout history.

Some of these small worlds smashed into the early Earth and Moon, depositing water. Some of these protons interact with oxygen molecules in the lunar soil to produce water. Based on remote observations by radar instruments aboard Chandrayaan-1 and LRO, the lunar poles have over billion kilograms of water ice. This is a low-end estimate because the amount of water detected is limited by the strength of spacecraft radar.

New missions with radars that penetrate deeper will likely find more water ice. These micro-cold traps increase the expected amount of water ice on the Moon by at least 10 to 20 percent.

Ideally, such a base would become self-sufficient. Water can be consumed by the crew, Kring explained, and used to create oxygen for breathing; it can also be employed as a radiation shield and turned into propellant for rockets. How much water are we talking about?

Current estimates for lunar water are on the order of several hundred parts per million. Imagine pouring a typical, half-litre bottle of water into a cubic metre of sand.

Distributed, the water would be impossible to notice: according to Lucey, there is about a hundred times as much water in a cubic metre of dry sand from the Sahara Desert. In the best case, therefore, a workable water-harvesting effort on the moon would look less like a Mars rover and more like a major industrial refinery.

Instead, she and her colleagues believe it is trapped in glass beads formed by micrometeorite impacts. When balls of space dust collide with the moon, they usually vaporize, along with the lunar surface at the point of impact. But the directly adjacent material melts, cools, and forms glass. This fusion happens instantaneously, and anything that happens to be incorporated into the melt is imprisoned.

The micrometeorite could itself contain water, which would be trapped; there could be water on the lunar surface already present at the point of impact; or the impact could cause a hydroxyl on the surface to fuse with other hydroxyls, forming water molecules. She and her team have requested seventy-two more hours of observation time.

Future lunar-spacecraft missions can investigate water abundance. When Mare Tranquillitatis was given its name, in , it was not meant metaphorically. For millennia, astronomers considered the moon to be Earthlike, with land and oceans. The only real question was whether the dark or light areas were submerged. Plutarch, the Greek philosopher, considered the darker regions of the moon to be seas and oceans; Johannes Kepler, who between and published the laws of planetary motion, believed that the sun would reflect forcefully on the lunar seas, casting them in white.

Galileo was cagier on the subject: he left readers to infer his belief that the seas were dark.