This illustration highlights the moon’s Clavius Crater with an illustration depicting water trapped in the lunar soil there, along with an image of NASA’s Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) that found sunlit lunar water. (NASA)

The search for water on the moon has produced a discovery of tiny molecule-sized perhaps widespread amounts of H20 in a sunlit lunar crater.

The water is not in a liquid or ice or gaseous form, but rather apparently contained (and protected) inside glass beads formed when micrometeorites hit the surface.

The detection was made using the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA), a high-flying modified airplane with an infrared telescope.

NASA scientists made clear that the lunar H2O in sunlight might prove to be too difficult to collect to be of use to astronauts, but future robotic and human missions on the lunar surface could also find more concentrated deposits now that they know some water is present.

“Prior to the SOFIA observations, we knew there was some kind of hydration” on the lunar surface said Casey Honniball, the lead author of a paper in the journal Nature Astronomy.  “But we didn’t know how much, if any, was actually water molecules – like we drink every day – or something more like drain cleaner.”

“Without a thick atmosphere, water on the sunlit lunar surface should just be lost to space,” said Honniball, who is now a postdoctoral fellow at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. “Yet somehow we’re seeing it. Something is generating the water, and something must be trapping it there.”

An artist rendering of ater and its chemical precursors spraying out from minerals on the moon’s surface after a micrometeorite impact. Researchers have delved deeper into this process in the lab, taking the influence of solar wind into account. (NASA Goddard Conceptual Image Lab.)

Scientists have searched for water on the moon since Apollo days, and have known for some time that frozen water exists in some always-dark craters of the lunar south pole. Prior lunar missions have also detected hydrogen on sunlit surfaces, and it was initially thought to be in the form of hydroxyl (OH) rather then  water (H2O.)

SOFIA offered a new means of looking at the moon. Flying at altitudes of up to 45,000 feet, this modified Boeing 747SP jetliner with a 106-inch diameter telescope reaches above 99% of the water vapor in Earth’s atmosphere to get a clearer view of the infrared universe.… Read more