New Delhi, September 15: With the help of India’s Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft, scientists of NASA were able to sketch out a global map of water on the soil of Moon. NASA’s Moon Mineralogy Mapper flew aboard Chandrayaan-1. The study published in the journal Science Advances builds on the initial discovery in 2009 of water and a related molecule — hydroxyl, which consists of one atom each of hydrogen and oxygen — in lunar soil.
The study’s lead author Shuai Li, a Ph.D. student at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, US said water is not limited to the polar regions and is present everywhere in the lunar surface. Li, who is also a post doctoral researcher at the University of Hawaii, further stated that amount of water increases toward the poles and does not show significant difference among distinct compositional terrains.
