New study shows Moon’s water may be widely distributed on surface

A new study based on two lunar missions has revealed that the Moon’s water may be widely distributed across the surface and is not isolated to a particular region or type of terrain.

The Nasa’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) and India’s Chandrayaan-1 missions have also suggested that the water appears to be present both day and night, though it is not necessarily easily accessible.

Results of the missions are also expected to help researchers understand the origin of the Moon’s water and its usefulness as a resource.

According to Nasa, if the Moon has enough water, and if it can be accessed easily, upcoming missions might be able to use it as drinking water or to convert it into hydrogen and oxygen for rocket fuel, or oxygen to breathe.

US-based Space Science Institute senior research scientist Joshua Bandfield said: “We find that it doesn’t matter what time of day or which latitude we look at, the signal indicating water always seems to be present.

“The presence of water doesn’t appear to depend on the composition of the surface, and the water sticks around.”

The data provided by the two lunar missions are in contrast to some previous studies, which had suggested that more water was detected at the Moon’s polar latitudes, as well as the strength of the water signal waxes and wanes according to the lunar day (29.5 Earth days).

Before reaching the latest conclusion, Bandfield and her colleagues discovered a new way to incorporate temperature information to create a detailed model from measurements made by the Diviner instrument on Nasa’s LRO.

The temperature model has been used to evaluate data collected previously by the Moon Mineralogy Mapper, a visible and infrared spectrometer that Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, provided for India’s Chandrayaan-1 orbiter.

The researchers are still analysing the findings of the two missions to know about the source of the Moon’s water.