Bangalore, September 24
India’s maiden lunar mission, Chandrayaan-1, has found evidence of large quantities of water on the surface of the moon, a top American scientist confirmed today.
“The moon has distinct signatures of water. The evidence of water molecules on the surface of the moon was found by the moon mineralogy mapper (M3) of the US-based National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) on board Chandrayaan-1”, M3 principal investigator Carle Pieters said in a paper published in the journal Science.
Data from the spacecraft also suggests water is still being formed on
the moon.
The moon mineralogy mapper, which was developed jointly by Brown University, Rhode Island, and the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, was one of the six foreign payloads on board the unmanned spacecraft that was launched on October 22, 2008 by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO). The mission had to be aborted August 30 after the craft lost radio contact with the earth.
ISRO chairman G Madhavan Nair had told the media Wednesday he could not yet confirm the presence of water on the moon, but had added “before the end of this week we’ll let you know”.
Confirming the finding and terming it a “major discovery”, Pieters said evidence of water on the lunar surface would reinvigorate studies of the moon and potentially change thinking on how it originated.
“The molecules and hydroxyl — a molecule consisting of one oxygen atom and one hydrogen atom — were discovered across the entire surface of the moon”, he said.
Carle Pieters, a planetary geologist at Brown, is the lead author of a paper published this week in Science that reported evidence of water at the moon’s high latitudes. “We have made a very important step with this discovery and now there’re some very important steps to follow up on,” he was quoted to have said.
He said the findings from M3 revealed interesting new questions about where the water molecules came from and where they might be going.
Scientists have speculated water molecules may migrate from the moon’s nonpolar regions to the poles, where they are stored as ice in ultra frigid pockets of craters that never receive sunlight.
'If the water molecules are as mobile as we think they are — even a fraction of them — they provide a mechanism for getting water to those permanently shadowed craters. This opens a whole
new avenue (of lunar research), but we have to understand the physics of it to utilise it”, Pieters noted.
The NASA payload found water molecules and hydroxyl at diverse areas of the sunlit region of the moon's surface, but the water signature appeared stronger at the moon's higher latitudes.
The discovery of water on the moon by the M3 has also in one stroke removed any suspicion that the critics may have about the satisfaction level of ISRO’s international partners about the moon mission’s truncated life.
Scientists are expected to use this information to answer questions about moon's origin and development and the evolution of terrestrial planets in the early solar system. — With inputs from IANS, Reuters
