Water on the moon

Diego A. Navarro

On October 9, 2009 the LCROSS space program slammed a Centaur rocket booster into the south pole of the Moon. The mission was intended to determine if any water ice exists under the surface of the moon. There have always been theories that over millions of years ago, comets containing water have collided with the moon and have brought water to the Moon. Most of it goes away over time, but if any water happens to accumulate at the bottom of the craters at the poles, where the Sun never shines, it stays on the moon frozen forever in the shadow. By impacting a spacecraft into the Moon, it can dislodge the ice where it gets hit by raw sunlight. The water breaks down into hydrogen which can be directly detected using spectroscopic methods.

The crater LCROSS inspected, later named Cabeus, has a floor temperature of -230 Celsius which is cold enough to maintain the ice. The rocket slammed into it at high speed, making a new crater about 20 meters across and splashed debris over a larger area. The material ejected from the crater had clear signs of water. The infrared spectrometer on the LCROSS definitely detected absorption lines from water, and the ultraviolet spectrometer saw it in emission. The amount of water they found in the debris was a couple of hundred kilograms in total, but that indicates there is a lot more still lying on the surface. The presence of large quantities of water on the Moon would be an important factor in rendering lunar habitation cost-effective, since transporting water from Earth would be extremely expensive. If future investigations find the quantities to be particularly large, water ice could be mined to provide liquid water for drinking and plant growing, the water could also be split into hydrogen and oxygen by electric power stations or a nuclear generator, providing breathable oxygen as well as the necessary components for rocket fuel. The hydrogen component of the water ice could also be used to draw out the oxides in the lunar soil and harvest even more oxygen.

Researchers found evidence of water inside the debris droplets showing that the lunar water is chemically identical to that on ancient Earth. Much of Earth's water is thought to have arrived in meteorites called carbonaceous chondrites that were inserted into the planet as it formed as the solar system was forming. According to the leading theory, the moon was created some time later, about 4.5 billion years ago, from a hot cloud of debris that was knocked into space when a planet the size of Mars slammed into Earth. The studies suggest the Earth was already damp at the time the moon was created, and that the intense heat of the collision failed to vaporize all of the water and that is what we are finding on the surface of the moon today. 

Although a lot of research still has to be done finding water on the moon is one of the most important findings of the century. This discovery means the possibility of lunar habitation and the ability to explore this new frontier in depth and being able to benefit from it the best we can.

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