How do we know there is water on the moon? Although hints of water had been seen before, water was only conclusively shown to be on the moon in 2009. NASA’s LCROSS mission was specifically designed for this purpose. One of the challenges of detecting water is that it exists deep within the permanently shadowed craters of the Moon’s poles. LCROSS overcame this by using a two-part mission, the spent rocket booster was initially crashed into one of the craters, leading to an explosion of the rock and ice at the bottom of the crater. A few minutes later the main LCROSS spacecraft flew through the cloud of debris and detected what was in it – including about 155 kg of water – beaming the data back to earth. Another few minutes later the spacecraft crashed into the Moon’s surface – but it has done its job.
Read more: Detection of Water in the LCROSS Ejecta Plume (https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1186986), LCROSS mission (https://science.nasa.gov/mission/lcross)
Water on Moon picture from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.
Graph from “Detection of Water in the LCROSS Ejecta Plume, Colaprete et al, Science, 2010”
Music: Snowfall by Scott Buckley
Source
