WATER FOUND ON THE MOON COULD QUENCH FUTURE ASTRONAUTS' THIRST

Water could be more widespread on the Moon than previously thought. New readings from NASA’s Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) indicate that molecular water (H2O) is present in the Clavius crater, one of the largest craters on the Moon.

- DR STUART CLARK

This discovery is important because water was thought to be present on the Moon only in the permanently shadowed regions near the lunar poles. Although Clavius is in the southern hemisphere at a relatively high latitude, its interior is exposed to sunlight. Since it seems that water can survive at or near the lunar surface here, it implies that water may be much more widely distributed across the lunar surface than previously recognised.

“Without a thick atmosphere, water on the sunlit lunar surface should just be lost to space,” said Dr Casey Honniball of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and the lead author of the new work. “Yet somehow we’re seeing it. Something is generating the water, and something must be trapping it there.”

But if it’s such a mystery how the water got there, could it mean the NASA researchers have made a mistake in their identification of the molecule? Prof Mahesh Anand, a planetary scientist from The Open University, UK, has studied the discovery and thinks the work is sound. “I think that the researchers have done a very good job in confirming that the spectral signature they are looking at can only be provided by molecular water,” he said.

Even so, the abundance of the water is not high. For comparison, the Sahara Desert possesses 100 times more water than was found in the lunar surface material by SOFIA.

Nevertheless, it is a potentially important discovery because the more water there is on the Moon, the easier it will be to set up a lunar base. The water could be extracted to drink, to make oxygen, and also to make rocket fuel.

Q&A WITH PROF MAHESH ANAND