Water in Moon’s Soil tagged posts

A new map reveals quantities of water trapped in the lunar soil. The amounts increase toward the poles, suggesting that much of the water was implanted by the solar wind (yellow dots mark Apollo landing sites). Credit: Milliken lab / Brown University

In research that may prove useful to future lunar explorers, scientists from Brown University have created the first quantitative map of water and its chemical building blocks trapped in the uppermost portion of the Moon’s soil. The study builds on the initial discovery in 2009 of water and a related molecule – hydroxyl – in the lunar soil. The latest study uses a new calibration of data taken from NASA’s Moon Mineralogy Mapper, which flew aboard India’s Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft, to quantify how much water is present on a global scale.

“The si...