Water on the silver globe

Chinese scientists… – someday the day had to come – so, Chinese scientists have discovered sizable deposits of water on the Moon. These are not open reservoirs, as on the blue planet Earth, nor underground oceans, as on the moons of Jupiter, Saturn and Neptune. They have found small glass balls in the lunar soil, which probably hide water. However, we’re talking about quite sizable deposits, with resources that could reach 297.6 billion tons. Recent decades of research have detected sizable reserves of it on the Moon. Scientists have concluded that there is a hydrated layer at some depth in the lunar rocks, however, so far it remains unidentified.

In search of water

In 1961. theoretical physicist Kenneth Watson described the possibility of water ice in lunar craters. The first to announce the discovery of water particles on the lunar surface, however, were Soviet scientists, back in 1978. They did so on the basis of analysis of samples that the Soviet probe Luna 24 had taken 2 years earlier from Mare Crisium and brought back to Earth. Since not a trace of water was found in the samples delivered in 1979. by the Apollo 11 mission, and reanalyses of the material from Luna 24 did not confirm the discovery, any discussion of the issue fell silent for a while. That was until the Clementine mission, sent into space jointly by NASA and SDI (Strategic Defense Initiative) – the organization set up by Ronald Regan to carry out the famous Star Wars program.

The Clementine probe, whose main purpose was to test new technologies, detected in 1994. potential water deposits near the lunar poles, including a particularly promising one in Schackleton Crater to the south. The mission was one of the landmark undertakings in NASA’s history. It recently celebrated the 30th anniversary of the 297 laps it made around the Silver Globe, mapping its surface in bands from infrared to ultraviolet. The spectrometer aboard the 1998 launch. NASA’s Lunar Prospector orbiter, which orbited the Silver Globe for nearly 19 months, collecting data for a topographic map before crashing into its surface at Shoemaker crater, helped confirm the existence of water ice at both poles. At the time, it was estimated that some 300 million tons of water may lie there in the lunar regolith.

Race

Thanks to significant technological advances in 2008. Apollo samples were reexamined. Hydrogen was found inside the small granules of volcanic glass. Since there are currently no active volcanoes on the Moon, this was explained by the presence of water during volcanic eruptions in its distant past. The discovery suggested that water was part of the Moon at the beginning of its existence, perhaps since its formation.

Others have joined the race for water on the moon. In 2007. The Japanese Kaguya probe searched for it unsuccessfully in the gamma ray band. That same year, China’s first Change-1 probe also went into orbit around the moon. In September 2009. it was made public that the ^M3 (Moon Mineralogy Mapper), a spectrometer aboard ISRO’s (Indian Space Research Organization) Chandrayaan-1 space probe, had detected absorption bands of hydroxyl or water on the lunar surface. The Moon Impact Probe (MIP), dropped from this probe, reported the presence of water in the rarefied atmosphere before it crashed into the Moon in Schackleton Crater.

NASA‘s LCROSS(Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite) has provided direct evidence of the presence of a large amount of water ice in the shadowy Cabeus crater at the South Pole. On October 9, 2009. Centaur – the module of the Atlas V rocket that carried LCROSS and LRO(Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter) – struck the Moon’s surface, ejecting a storm of material that may not have seen sunlight for billions of years. Just 4 minutes later, LCROSS flew through that cloud, sending data back to Earth. It then also shattered on the surface.

In addition to water, magnesium, calcium, mercury, sodium and silver were detected. LRO, which was orbiting the Moon at the same time, making a 3D map of it, among other things. its 3D map, observed the fall of Centaur and LCROSS using synthetic aperture radar, confirming the presence of ice in the regolith. LRO then searched for water on the Moon by measuring neutron fluxes through its Lunar Exploration Neutron Detector (LEND). It continues to orbit the Moon.

In 2011. Water molecules have been detected in more samples from the Apollo program – this time from the 1972 Apollo 17 lander. The rocks, however, came from too deep to be of importance to future Moon colonists.

In January 2014. the neutral mass spectrometer on NASA’s LADEE(Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer) detected water molecules released by meteoroid impacts on the Moon’s surface in its atmosphere (more correctly: exosphere). In doing so, he confirmed revelations provided by the Chandrayaan probe’s MIP probe several years earlier. Laddie observed three more meteor streams in April of the same year, after which he struck the Moon. The observations proved that lunar water cannot come entirely from meteors. Neon was also detected in the Moon’s exosphere.

Molecular water on the Moon’s surface is currently detected from Earth by telescopic observations, while in the infrared band the German-American SOPHIE(Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy) laboratory, flying aboard a 747 jumbo jet, has detected water in the Clavius crater on the Sun-lit surface.

New water source

December 2020. China ‘ s Chang’e 5 lander spent several weeks collecting samples on the surface of the Silver Globe. The material taken from theOcean of Storms(Oceanus Procellarum) allowed to draw sensational conclusions. The Chinese discovered that the impact glass pellets, found in the samples brought back, contain water from solar winds. This happens as a result of the combination of hydrogen ions from the streams of solar particles with the oxygen present in the enamel.

Impact glass pellets are formed by collisions of rocks and evaporation of minerals, which, when cooled, form small spheres only a few to a few hundred micrometers in diameter. On Earth, we find similar formations – for example, tektites in the Chicxulub impact crater. On the Moon, they were first discovered in lunar samples from the Apollo missions, however, water particles or hydroxyl groups were not immediately noticed in them. Each glass bead can contain up to 0.002 grams of water per gram of its mass.

On the dark side of the globe…

Because the Moon has fallen into resonance while orbiting the Earth, it always faces us with the same hemisphere (with a correction for libration, which is due to the disruption of this motion by Venus, the Sun and Jupiter and allows us to actually observe as much as 59 percent of its surface at different times). It is therefore customary to divide its selenography into two hemispheres: dark and bright. The bright one is the one that can be seen from Earth. The dark one is dark not because the sun’s light never reaches it, but because radio signals from Earth do not reach it.

This important detail escapes the denialists, who claim that neither man nor any machine constructed by man has so far reached the Silver Globe, but more on that later. Since radio signals won’t bounce off the Moon’s ultra-small atmosphere either, exploration of the dark side will be somewhat of a challenge for future Moon colonists, at least initially….

On June 2, 2024. The Chinese flag unfurled on the invisible dark side of the Moon. The Chang’e-6 probe began its journey on May 3. Almost perfectly a month later, it landed in the Aitken Basin at the South Pole, on the side not visible from Earth. After 2 days it set off on its return journey with samples of lunar soil. Is there water on the dark side of the moon as well?

The future of the moon and lunar water deposits

The race for water on the Moon continues – there is no doubt that its deposits will be one of the key factors in attempts to establish permanent bases (the other will be helium-3 deposits, which the US and China have already begun to fight over). Later this year, NASA will send the PRIME-1(Polar Resources Ice Mining Experiment-1) lander to the Moon. Equipped with a drill and a mass spectrometer, it is expected to undertake the extraction of ice and other volatiles in Schackleton Crater. The very good news for future exploration of the Solar System is that water is already waiting for us on the Moon, although we don’t yet know how to reach for it.

The second is that glass spheres formed by collisions on the surfaces of atmosphereless bodies in the Solar System are capable of storing water formed when they are smeared by solar winds. As Martin Elvis noted in his book Asteroids: How Love, Fear and Greed Will Determine Our Future in Space, water will be a major issue for developing future mining in the Asteroid Belt.

In the article, I used, among other things. z:

Asif A. Siddiqi (2018) Beyond Earth: A Chronicle of Deep Space Exploration, 1958-2016. NASA

Arlin Crotts (2014) The New Moon Water, Exploration, and Future Habitation. Cambridge University Press.

Martin Elvis (2022) Asteroids: How love, fear and greed will determine our future in space, Copernicus Center Press.

Huicun He et alia (2023) A solar wind-derived water reservoir on the Moon hosted by impact glass beads. “Nature Geoscience” 16:294-300.

Stewart Nozett et alia (1994) The Clementine Mission to the Moon: Scientific Overview, “Science” 266(5192):1835-1839.

Paul D. Spudis (2016) The Value of the Moon: How to Explore, Live, and Prosper in Space Using the Moon Resources. Smithonian Books, Washington.

Elizabeth Zubritsky, William Steigerwald, Nancy Jones (2019) Meteoroid Strikes Eject Precious Water From Moon, Goddard, NASA.

John Uri (2024) 30 Years Ago: Clementine Changes Our View of the Moon, NASA.