The Mystery of Moon Water
Ten years ago, a rocket slammed into the moon.
The impact sent a plume of lunar material from the moon’s south pole flying out into space. For a few minutes, the spacecraft that had unleashed the rocket coasted through the mist, its instruments absorbing as much data as they could. Amid the molecules of methane, ammonia, carbon dioxide, and other compounds, the spacecraft detected something wonderfully familiar: water.
Not liquid water, but grains of water ice. The discovery helped reshape our understanding of Earth’s satellite. Though scientists had long believed that the moon was quite dry, they had begun to harbor suspicions that water might lurk somewhere in its shadowy regions. The excavated material showed them they were right to wonder. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to suggest there was a lot more.
This is where NASA wants, the Trump administration’s effort to return astronauts to the moon in the next five years. The hope is that future spacefarers could mine the ice as a resource for their moon bases. “We know that there’s hundreds of millions of tons of water ice on the surface of the moon,” Bridenstine says. Sometimes he says there’s hundreds of billions of tons.
