In contrast, he notes, the “very unique” spectral features of water in the M3 data incontrovertibly show the presence of exposed ice on the floors of craters across the moon’s polar regions. And also, there is only one data point in the south polar region,” Shuai says. However, the conclusion of surface exposed ice from this mission is based on modeling it is indirect. Likewise, Shuai adds, although NASA's Lunar CRater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) mission did uncover signs of lunar water in 2009, when it sent probes crashing into the permanently shadowed region of Cabeus Crater near the moon’s south pole, that water was not necessarily from exposed ice at the surface.
In fact, he notes, many past claims of “water” on the moon were really just detections of hydrogen-enriched, bone-dry minerals on the lunar surface. Similarly, instruments carried onboard NASA’s still-circling Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter cannot directly, definitively detect the presence of water ice, he says. For decades radar sweeps from Earth of the lunar polar regions and by moon-orbiting craft have delivered ambiguous results.
“Before our work there is no direct evidence to show there is surface exposed water ice on the moon,” says lead author Shuai Li, a planetary scientist at the University of Hawaii in Mānoa. Such sparse coverage and heterogeneity suggests this lunar ice has a substantially different history than similar deposits found on other airless rocky worlds, such as Mercury and the dwarf planet Ceres, where water ice in permanently shadowed craters is more abundant and of greater purity. The results appeared in a study published August 20 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.īased on M3’s measurements of water ice’s near-infrared absorption features at and around the lunar poles, the study’s authors concluded the ice is only exposed in around 3.5 percent of the craters’ shadowed area, and is intermixed with large volumes of lunar dust. Such deposits could someday support crewed lunar outposts while also revealing previously hidden chapters of the moon’s history. Gathered by NASA’s Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3) spectrometer onboard the Indian probe, the data all but confirm extensive-but-tentative evidence from earlier missions hinting at water ice deposits lurking in permanently shadowed craters at the moon’s poles. The view that Earth’s moon is a dried out, desolate world may be all wet.Ī new analysis of data from the Indian Space Research Organization’s Chandrayaan 1 orbiter, which operated at the moon from 2008 to 2009, has revealed what researchers say is definitive proof of water ice exposed on the lunar surface.
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