An Indian space mission claims to have found water on the moon, raising hopes that a manned base could be established there within the next two decades.
It has been widely believed that the moon was dry, but data from India's Chandrayaan-1 mission allegedly found clear evidence of water there, apparently concentrated at the poles and possibly formed by the solar wind.
What's more, water appears to still be forming, advancing the possibility that human life could be sustained there. Scientists hope that astronauts could one day not only drink the water but extract oxygen from it to breathe and hydrogen to use as fuel.
The man who led the mission, Dr Mylswamy Annadurai, told the Times today how pleased he was at the discovery, which significantly enhances India's position in its space race with China.
"It's very satisfying," he said. "This was one of the main objectives of Chandrayaan-1, to find evidence of water on the moon."
The reports from the Indian mission were backed up by the findings of two other studies to be published in the journal Science on Friday, showing that the water may be actively moving around, forming and reforming as particles mixed up in the dust on the surface of the moon.
Carle Pieters, of Brown University on Rhode Island, and colleagues reviewed data from India's Chandrayaan-1 mission – India's first mission to the moon – and found spectrographic evidence of water. The water seems thicker closer to the poles, they reported.
"When we say 'water on the moon,' we are not talking about lakes, oceans or even puddles. Water on the moon means molecules of water and hydroxyl (hydrogen and oxygen) that interact with molecules of rock and dust specifically in the top millimetres of the moon's surface," Pieters said in a statement.
Jessica Sunshine of the University of Maryland and colleagues used infrared mapping from Nasa's Deep Impact spacecraft to show water all over the moon, while Roger Clark of the US Geological Survey and colleagues used a spectrometer – which breaks down light waves to analyse elements and chemicals reflecting them – from the Cassini spacecraft to identify water.
"These reports of lunar surface water coincide with intense interest in water at the poles of the Moon," Paul Lucey of the University of Hawaii, who was not involved in the research, wrote in a commentary.
"There may be much 'wetter' regions to be discovered far from the sites that have been sampled to date," Lucey added.
"It is also possible that rare water-bearing minerals previously observed in lunar samples, but argued to be terrestrial contamination, might be indigenous. Perhaps the most valuable result of these new observations is that they prompt a critical re-examination of the notion that the Moon is dry. It is not."
Next month, Nasa's Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite or LCROSS mission will try to detect water by deliberately crashing a large spacecraft on to the moon.
👉This article was amended on 1 October 2009. The original headline said this was India's first space mission. This has been corrected.
Comments
Post a Comment