Scientists recently solved some longstanding lunar mysteries, including how the Moon is producing its own water.
While it turns out that the Moon is not made out of Swiss cheese (disappointing, I know—that would have been a food source for lunar explorers), it does act like a big sponge of sorts. The lunar surface is a loose collection of irregular dust grains, known as regolith. Basically, the regolith absorbs electrically charged particles given out by the Sun. These electrically charged particles interact with molecules of oxygen that are already present in lunar dust, and voila, you have H2O.
Incoming protons are trapped in the spaces between the grains, absorbed, and then interact with the oxygen in the lunar regolith to produce hydroxyl and water.
So, there’s water on the moon, and we now know how it’s getting there, but what does that do for us from a practical standpoint? Could humans living on a lunar base drink this moon water, for example?
The main problem on making water available for human consumption will be how to extract it from the lunar rocks,” Detlef Koschny, an ESA Chandrayaan-1 Project Scientist, explained to The Daily Galaxy. “This is technically very challenging and needs to be solved first.”
This discovery, made by SARA (an instrument jointly built by scientific groups from
According to Koschny, we’ve still got a long ways to go before this water can be harvested, but understanding how the water is produced on the moon in the first place is an important first step in figuring out how to collect it. (Daily Galaxy)