Water Ice Confirmed on Moon's Surface
TEHRAN (Tasnim) - Scientists have identified three specific signatures that definitively prove there is water ice at the surface of the Moon.
A team of scientists, led by Shuai Li of the University of Hawaii and Brown University and including Richard Elphic from NASA's Ames Research Center in California's Silicon Valley, used data from NASA's Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3) instrument to identify three specific signatures that definitively prove there is water ice at the surface of the Moon, Science Daily reported.
M3, aboard the Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft, launched in 2008 by the Indian Space Research Organization, was uniquely equipped to confirm the presence of solid ice on the Moon. It collected data that not only picked up the reflective properties we'd expect from ice, but was able to directly measure the distinctive way its molecules absorb infrared light, so it can differentiate between liquid water or vapor and solid ice.
Most of the newfound water ice lies in the shadows of craters near the poles, where the warmest temperatures never reach above minus 250 degrees Fahrenheit. Because of the very small tilt of the Moon's rotation axis, sunlight never reaches these regions.
Previous observations indirectly found possible signs of surface ice at the lunar south pole, but these could have been explained by other phenomena, such as unusually reflective lunar soil.
With enough ice sitting at the surface -- within the top few millimeters -- water would possibly be accessible as a resource for future expeditions to explore and even stay on the Moon, and potentially easier to access than the water detected beneath the Moon's surface.
Learning more about this ice, how it got there, and how it interacts with the larger lunar environment will be a key mission focus for NASA and commercial partners, as we endeavor to return to and explore our closest neighbor, the Moon.
In 2009, a NASA mission called the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) launched an impactor into one of these craters. The orbiting probe detected the signature of water ice in the ejecta, but that only proved there was ice present. The new data adds the crucial detail that ice is present on the surface. Any more than a few millimeters deep, and it becomes much harder to harvest and utilize ice on the moon.