Scientists say they have discovered water trapped inside tiny beads of glass scattered across the moon, suggesting a potential reservoir of this precious resource for future human activities on the lunar surface.
The moon was long believed to be dry, but over the last few decades, several missions have shown there is water both on the surface and trapped inside minerals.
Scientists said on Monday that an analysis of lunar soil samples retrieved in 2020 during China’s robotic Chang’ e-5 mission showed that these spheres of glass – rock melted and cooled – bore within them water molecules formed through the action of the solar wind on the moon’s surface.
“The moon is constantly bombarded with impactors – for example micrometeoroids and large meteoroids – which produce impact glass beads during high-energy flash-heating events,” said planetary scientist Sen Hu of the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Geology and Geophysics, a co-author of the study published in the journal Nature Geoscience.
(Aljazeera)
