Water on the Moon May Lie Below the Lunar Surface

In a press release NASA announced that a lunar research team may have found evidence of water locked in mineral grains on the surface of the moon from an unknown source deep beneath the surface.

The new “water on the Moon” discovery is based on data from NASA’s Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3) instrument aboard the Indian Space Research Organization’s Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft.

Using this instrument, says NASA, the scientists have detected “magmatic water” on the Moon’s surface. This is water that originates from deep within the moon’s interior.

“This rock, which normally resides deep beneath the surface, was excavated from the lunar depths by the impact that formed Bullialdus crater,” said Rachel Klima, a planetary geologist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Md.

“Compared to its surroundings, we found that the central portion of this crater contains a significant amount of hydroxyl – a molecule consisting of one oxygen atom and one hydrogen atom — which is evidence that the rocks in this crater contain water that originated beneath the lunar surface,” Klima said.

The new evidence of water on the Moon contradicts the earlier held belief that the traces of water found in the rocks from the Apollo missions were due to contamination from Earth.

“Now that we have detected water that is likely from the interior of the moon, we can start to compare this water with other characteristics of the lunar surface,” said Klima. “This internal magmatic water also provides clues about the moon’s volcanic processes and internal composition, which helps us address questions about how the moon formed, and how magmatic processes changed as it cooled.”