For the longest time, we believed the Moon was a barren wasteland. Then in 2017, thanks to data from the Chandrayaan-1 mission, we discovered there was water on its surface.
Now as Chandrayaan 2 makes its way to the Moon, we might find a lot more water up there than previous estimates.
NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University
First in 2008 researchers found water trapped in glass beads of volcanic rock from samples collected during the Apollo missions. Then in 2017, Brown University's Department of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences used the Chandrayaan-1 data to look at those beads once more. When the lander crashed into the Moon, it found similar beads all over, indicating the Moon likely has more water than we previously thought.
They suspected there's a lot of water deep below the lunar surface, and in more areas than just around the poles as originally believed. It was only earlier this year that NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) provided more insight. Its Lyman Alpha Mapping Project (LAMP), which uses ultraviolet light to search for signs of water in craters, threw up data indicating that water particles move across the Moon's surface, as opposed to being trapped in the regolith.
Now, newer research has emerged that suggests the amount of water we could find up there on our satellite is somehow even more.?
In a study from the Department of Earth, Planetary and Space Sciences at the University of California, the researchers compared the thermal conditions of shadowed craters on both the Moon and Mercury.?
They compared data from 2,000 shaded craters of Mercury again to 12,000 similar ones on the Moon. And their data indicates these craters could contain millions of tonnes of ice.?
ISRO
Luckily for Chandrayaan 2, it's headed to the south polar region of the Moon, which is exactly where the craters are likely filled with ice. So ISRO could be the first to actually confirm this data when it lands there later this year.
If that is the case, that ice will become a valuable resource for both future Moon missions as well as colonization efforts. It will mean having to transport less water while setting up an astronaut base on the natural satellite, and can also be broken down in order to provide oxygen for dwellers.