Water on the Moon found in lunar topsoil by Chandrayaan-1

Lunar Mining Concept Courtesy NASA

Scientists have confirmed that the Indian space probe Chandrayaan-1, has found water on the Moon. While it is still thought that a great deal of water ice resides in the permanently shadowed craters at the lunar poles, this discovery has suggested that water prevails throughout the lunar surface.

Chandrayaan-1 discovered that there were water and hydroxyl molecules mixed up in the lunar top soil. Hydroxyl consists of one oxygen and one hydrogen atom. At first scientists thought that there was something wrong with the Moon Mineral Mapper instrument on the Chandrayaan-1 for it to get such unexpected and remarkable readings.

Then Dr. Jessica Sunshine, a University of Maryland astronomer and co investigator on the Moon Mineral Mapper remembered that the Deep Impact probe, when it passed by the Moon on the way to its asteroid destination, had picked up similar readings. Scientists also recalled that the Cassini space probe, now in orbit around Saturn, had detected water and hydroxyl in the lunar surface as it had flown by the Moon on its way to Saturn.

The Moon is still dryer than any desert on Earth. A statement from Brown University suggested that the amount of water on the Moon could be 1000 parts per million in the lunar top soil. That would still not be a lot, by Earthly standards, about a medicine dropper full per two liter bottle of lunar soil.

Still, future lunar miners could process the soil, acquiring useful materials, now including water, in a strip mining operation. Even more than the idea of water ice in the polar craters, this could be a boon for future lunar settlers.

Scientists, including Sunshine and Dr. Carle Pieters of Brown University, principle investigator for the Moon Mineral Mapper instrument, are debating just how the water got there. Comet impacts are one theory, but another suggests that solar wind has been depositing the water into the lunar surface over billions of years. In any event that means that the Moon is a far more dynamic world that has hitherto be thought to have been.