Moon meteorite12/23/2023 The researchers estimate that the water content in the lunar soil under the surface could be up to 0.6 percent. “This is the first insight into water in the subsurface zone.” “Many people think that remote-sensing spacecraft only found the evidence of water around the poles simply because we can’t see under the surface below a few millimeters,” Kayama said. And India’s probe Chandrayaan-1 recorded evidence of water in the thin atmosphere above the moon’s surface.īut, according to Kayama, there has been no evidence so far of the presence of water in the subsurface at mid and lower latitudes. For example, NASA’s Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite detected the stuffin a shadowed crater near the moon’s south pole. Scientists already knew that there’s water on the moon. But in the subsurface, much water remains as ice, because it’s protected from the sunlight.” That’s the case on the surface of the moon. “In a moganite, there is less water, because moganite forms from the evaporation of water. “For the first time, we can prove that there is water ice in the lunar material,” Kayama told. According to Kayama, there is a good reason to believe that, deeper under the lunar surface, crystals of water ice could be abundant, protected from the harsh solar rays. Kayama and his team believe the mineral formed on the surface of the moon in the area called Procellarum Terrane, as water originally present in lunar dirt evaporated due to exposure to strong sunlight. It has never before been detected in samples of lunar rock. Moganite, a crystal of silicon dioxide similar to quartz, is known to form on Earth in specific circumstances in sedimentary settings from alkaline fluids. The find suggests that hidden caches of water ice potentially useful for human exploration might be hidden under the surface of the moon, study team members said.Ī team of Japanese scientists led by Masahiro Kayama from the Department of Earth and Planetary Materials Science at Tohoku University found the mineral, called moganite, in a lunar meteorite discovered in a desert in northwest Africa. A mineral that requires the presence of water to form has been discovered in a lunar meteorite, a new study reports.
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