NASA discovers water trapped inside moon's sunlit surfaces, says it's more 'widespread'

In a groundbreaking discovery, NASA confirmed on October 31 that its Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) found water trapped inside the sunlit surface of the Moon. Confirming that there could be more water on the moon than previously thought of, NASA said, water is not limited to cold, shadowed lunar places but instead is distributed across the entire lunar surface. 

“SOFIA has detected water molecules (H2O) in Clavius Crater, one of the largest craters visible from Earth, located in the Moon’s southern hemisphere,” NASA revealed in an official release to the press.

It added, that the space administration’s scientific team had detected some form of hydrogen earlier, but all the previous observations have now been confirmed.

Moon has water in concentrations of 100 to 412 parts per million trapped in a cubic meter of soil spread across the lunar surface, NASA said in an announcement, adding, that roughly makes a 12-ounce bottle of water on the Earth. Further, the astronauts published the results of the findings in the journal Nature Astronomy. Often confused with hydroxyl (OH) chemical component, the water on the lunar surface detected in the data of the previous observations had confused the scientists.

“We had indications that H2O – the familiar water we know – might be present on the sunlit side of the Moon,” said Paul Hertz, director of the Astrophysics Division in the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

 “Now we know it is there. This discovery challenges our understanding of the lunar surface and raises intriguing questions about resources relevant for deep space exploration,” he added.

Under its Artemis program, the space administration is now learning more about the presence of water on the moon to determine its accessibility for use as a resource. Furthermore, NASA I planning to send the first woman and next, a man to the lunar surface in 2024 to establish a human presence on the lunar surface by the time this decade ends. "SOFIA’s results build on years of previous research examining the presence of water on the Moon. When the Apollo astronauts first returned from the Moon in 1969, it was thought to be completely dry. Orbital and impactor missions over the past 20 years, such as NASA’s Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, confirmed ice in permanently shadowed craters around the Moon’s poles,” NASA revealed, elaborating the journey of the mind-boggling discovery.

[Moon’s Clavius Crater with an illustration depicting water trapped in the lunar soil there, along with an image of NASA’s Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) that found sunlit lunar water. Credits: NASA/Daniel Rutter]

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Earlier, as NASA confirmed, several observatories and spacecraft such as NASA’s Cassini mission and Deep Impact comet mission, Indian Space Research Organization’s Chandrayaan-1 mission, and NASA’s ground-based Infrared Telescope Facility, have found the presence of hydrogen on the lunar surface although it wasn’t established until now by the scientists whether it was H2O or OH.

Lead author who published the results from her graduate thesis work at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa in Honolulu said in the release that the astronauts did, although, speculate that there was some kind of hydration. “But we didn’t know how much, if any, was actually water molecules – like we drink every day – or something more like drain cleaner,” she added. 

[The Clavius crater on the moon as seen by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. The SOFIA observatory has detected water ice in shadowed regions of this sunlit lunar location. Credit: NASA/Moon Trek/USGS/LRO]

SOFIA'S discovery of water

NASA's modified Boeing 747SP jetliner with a 106-inch diameter telescope flew at an altitude of up to 45,000 feet and used its Faint Object infraRed CAmera for the SOFIA Telescope (FORCAST) that picked the wavelength unique to water molecules at 6.1 microns on the moon's Clavius Crater. Researcher at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, Honniball said that the finding now raises mystery for the scientists that what got the water trapped on the lunar surface. "Something is generating the water, and something must be trapping it there," he said.

According to NASA, the water on the moon was trapped into tiny beadlike structures in the soil that formed out of the high heat created by micrometeorite impacts. Meanwhile, according to scientists the water could have been hidden between grains of lunar soil and sheltered from the sunlight all this while, which potentially makes it "more accessible than water trapped in beadlike structures."

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