NASA revealed it has detected more water on the moon than has ever been found before.
“For the first time water has been confirmed to be present on a sunlit surface of the moon,” said Paul Hertz, director of the Astrophysics Division in NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in a press conference Monday. “This is exciting because the expectation is that any water present on a sunlit surface of the moon would not survive the lunar day.”
The discovery was made using NASA’s Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, which is actually a modified Boeing 747SP aircraft that carries a 2.7-meter reflecting telescope. It flies into Earth’s stratosphere from 38,000-45,000 feet altitude so it rises above 99% of Earth’s infrared-blocking atmosphere.
“This discovery reveals that water might be distributed across the lunar surface, and not limited to the cold, shadowed places near the lunar poles where we had previously discovered water ice,” Hertz said.
Details of the observations were published in Nature Astronomy, and discussed in a press conference Monday.
“We had indications that H2O – the familiar water we know – might be present on the sunlit side of the Moon,” Hertz said. “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.”
Specifically, the study said SOFIA detected water molecules in the Clavius Crater on the moon’s Southern Hemisphere. NASA said while hydrogen has been detected previously, it could not be discerned from a similar chemical compound called hydroxl (OH). The measurements show low levels of molecules, not in the form of ice or liquid, only between 100 and 412 parts per million.
NASA said that’s akin to a 12-ounce bottle of water spread out across a cubic meter of soil.
NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine weighed in, stating on Twitter, “We don’t know yet if we can use it as a resource, but learning about water on the moon is key for our #Artemis exploration plans.”
SOFIA’s missions, which are a partnership between NASA and the German Aerospace Center, allow a better view than ground-based telescopes and since it’s airborne, allow for more mobility. It’s run out of NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California.
Past missions have allowed it to make observations of eclipses and similar events, and for distant planetary objects such as Pluto, Saturn’s moon Titan and even the next target for NASA’s New Horizon’s spacecraft in the Kuiper Belt. In 2016, a SOFIA release announcing it had measured oxygen in Mars’ atmosphere made headlines.
The discovery was made during a test run of SOFIA in August 2018, the first time it had been used to look at the moon, according to researchers. It happened over Nevada on the way back to its home base.
“Prior to the SOFIA observations, we knew there was some kind of hydration,” said Casey Honniball, the lead author who published the results from her graduate thesis work at the University of Hawaii at Manoa in Honolulu, according to a NASA press release. “But we didn’t know how much, if any, was actually water molecules – like we drink every day – or something more like drain cleaner.”
Now, NASA plans to use SOFIA more to augment a future lunar lander missions called VIPER, which stands for Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover, and other missions to begin a water resource map of the lunar surface.
Just where and why the water is located on the moon is uncertain.
“Without a thick atmosphere, water on the sunlit lunar surface should just be lost to space,” said Honniball. “Yet, somehow we’re seeing it. Something is generating the water, and something must be trapping it there.”
NASA release suggested it could come from small meteorites hitting the surface or the result of solar winds sending hydrogen to the surface and mixing with oxygen in the lunar soil and then forming into H20.
NASA is interested in water as a resource for a permanent lunar outpost.
“Water is a valuable resource, for both scientific purposes and for use by our explorers,” said Jacob Bleacher, chief exploration scientist for NASA’s Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate. “If we can use the resources at the Moon, then we can carry less water and more equipment to help enable new scientific discoveries.”
Watch the announcement below or on NASA.gov/nasalive
