The discovery It has implications for the operations of astronauts at the South Pole Lunar in the Artemis da NASA program.
A laboratory simulation of NASA confirms a 60 -year forecast that the sun is a source of the components that make up the water on the moon.
According to the theory, when a flow of loaded particles, known as solar wind, reaches the lunar surface, triggers a chemical reaction that can generate water molecules, On Tuesday reported the agency
The discovery wrote the investigators in an article published in JGR Planets, It has implications for the operations of astronauts at the South Pole Lunar in the Artemis da NASA program.
It is believed that much of the moon water, a crucial resource for exploration, It is frozen in regions permanently in the shadow of the poles.
“Most interesting is that, with only lunar soil and a sun building block, which is always releasing hydrogen, there is the possibility of creating water,” said Li Hsia Yeo, a researcher at NASA’s Goddard Space Flying Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, quoted in a statement.
The solar wind constantly flows from the sun. It is mainly composed of protons, which are nuclei of hydrogen atoms that have lost their electrons.
Traveling over one million kilometers per hour, the solar wind bathes the entire solar system. Evidence of this is recorded on Earth when it illuminates the sky with the famous boreal or southern auroras.
Space Probe measurements They have already suggested that solar wind is primarily responsible for water formation, or its components, on the lunar surface.
An important track, confirmed by the experience of Yeo’s team: The spectral signature of the moon is related to changes in water throughout the day.
In some regions, it is more intense in colder mornings and weakens as the surface warms, probably because water and hydrogen molecules move or escape to space.
As the surface cools again at night, the signal reaches its peak. This daily cycle points to an active source — Probably the solar wind — that replenishes small amounts of water on the moon every day.
To test this, Yeo and his colleague, Jason McLain, a scientist in NASA Goddard, They built a device made to examine Apollo’s lunar samples.
For the first time, the device housed all the components of the experience inside: an air -beam beam device, an air -free chamber simulating the lunar environment and a molecule detector.
A inventionallowed investigators to avoid having to remove the sample from the chamberas happened in other experiences, and expose it to water contamination in the air.
Using dust of two different samples collected on the moon by NASA Apollo 17 astronauts in 1972, Yeo and their colleagues first baked the samples to remove any possible water that could have collected between the hermetic storage in the installation of NASA space samples at NASA’s Johnson space in Houston, and the Goddard laboratory.
Then they used a small particle accelerator to bombard the simulated solar dust for several days — the equivalent of 80,000 years on the moon, based on the high dose of particles used.
Used a detector called the concea to measure the amount of light reflected by dust molecules, This showed how the chemical composition of the samples has changed over time.
Finally, The team observed a decrease in the light signal reflected from their detector precisely at the point of the infrared region of the electromagnetic spectrum (about 3 microns) where water normally absorbs energy, leaving a revealing signal.
