UT scientist detects water on the moon

Scientists, including one from Knoxville, are helping to unravel a mystery that's decades old.

When Apollo astronauts brought back moon rocks, most of the cases containing the minerals leaked. The trace amounts of water researchers later found might have come from Earth's air, rather than the moon rocks themselves.

The default presumption for the next several decades was that, aside from some ice at the poles, there was not likely any water on the moon.

But now, a team of researchers, including UT's Professor Larry Taylor, have studied light reflections off the moon--and were able to determine areas where water is likely to be found.

The Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3) was carried on the Indian Chandrayyan-1 satellite. It's India's first lunar expedition.

The M3 analyzes the way light reflects off the lunar services, to determine what materials make up the soil. Different minerals reflect light in different wavelengths.

Scientists used those differences to know what's present in the thin uppermost layer of soil. The technique is called reflectance spectrometry.

Specifically, they looked for wavelengths indicating a bond between hydrogen and oxygen.

Having found signs of water in the uppermost layers of the moon's soil, they had to ask: where did it come from?

The current theory is oxygen from the moon's soil and rocks combined with hydrogen deposited at a high speed on the surface by solar winds.

With those hydrogen atoms moving at a speed around one third the speed of light, the bonds of the oxygen in the soil and minerals are occasionally broken, re-combining to form water. Researchers believe there's about a quart of water per ton of soil.

The M3 team, funded by NASA, is led by researchers at Brown University. Taylor and UT's Planetary Geosciences Institute collaborate with colleagues at Brown and in India.

You can see a closer picture of their mapping project in the summary report, posted on wbir.com.