NASA discovers water on sunlit surface of moon

NASA discovered some water on the sunlit surface of the moon for the first time, raising questions about how water is created and how it persists on the lunar surface, NASA announced Monday. 

NASA’s Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) detected water molecules in Clavius Crater, a large crater visible from Earth, confirming previous observations that there may be water on the sunlit surface of the moon, according to NASA’s announcement. 

“Prior to the SOFIA observations, we knew there was some kind of hydration,” Casey Honniball, the lead author who published the results from her graduate thesis work at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa in Honolulu, said in the announcement. “But we didn’t know how much, if any, was actually water molecules — like we drink every day — or something more like drain cleaner.”

The data from the location revealed water in concentrations of 100 to 412 parts per million, which is roughly equivalent to a 12-ounce bottle of water, trapped in a cubic meter of soil spread across the lunar surface, NASA said. For comparison, the agency said the Sahara desert has 100 times the amount of water that NASA’s SOFIA detected in the lunar soil.

The discovery, however, raises new questions about how water persists on the airless lunar surface. NASA said it is eager to learn more about the presence of water on the Moon during its upcoming planned Artemis program, which aims to send the first women and next man to the lunar surface in 2024. 

The discovery was made in August 2018 during a test flight in aimed at seeing what type of information SOFIA could observe about the moon. 

“It was, in fact, the first time SOFIA has looked at the Moon, and we weren’t even completely sure if we would get reliable data, but questions about the Moon’s water compelled us to try,” Naseem Rangwala, SOFIA’s project scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, said in the announcement. “It’s incredible that this discovery came out of what was essentially a test, and now that we know we can do this, we’re planning more flights to do more observations.”

SOFIA’s follow-up flights will look for water in additional sunlit locations and during different lunar phases to learn more about how water is produced, stored and moved across the moon, NASA said.