NASA: Meteorites can hit the moon and cause plumes of water in the space

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This is the story of a new study announced by NASA that challenges our perceptions of the moon and other rocky orbs in space.

Micrometeorites collide with the moon at high speed and send shock waves that echo through the lunar surface. They only need to penetrate a few inches to stir the water deposits, and the high energy of the collision converts the molecules into water vapor. The plumes shoot out in space. Most molecules dissipate in the very thin atmosphere that surrounds the moon, while some resettle in the ground.

The new vision of our closest neighbor in space comes from a study recently published in Nature Geoscience by scientists at NASA, Johns Hopkins University and the University of Maryland -Baltimore.

The main author of the study was Mehdi Benna, a planetary scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. He told CNN that the breakthrough "is an important part of the puzzle" as to what happens when meteorites collide with other "airless bodies" around our solar system and beyond.

This shows that water is not just locked in the ground and, according to Benna, this has implications for how future human or robotic explorers on the moon can utilize the resources there.

Scientists thought that meteorites could create lunar water deposits. Now, they know for sure

Benna, who is also a scientist in planetary science at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County, said that water is prevalent "in the world" on the moon. But there are many things we do not know about his day-to-day behavior.

He led colleagues in the exploration of data compiled by the neutral mass spectrometer aboard the Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE), a robotic mission in orbit around the moon.

Scientists used data from LADEE, a robotic device that studied the moon from its orbit until 2014.

Previous lunar probes such as Cassini and Deep Impact had shown "the existence of an active cycle of water on the moon," wrote Benna and his co-authors. They decided to study 33 plumes of water on the surface, of which 29 known and 4 new ones.

Scientists knew that water plumes corresponded to times of presence of meteorite streams. And the computer molecules had predicted that meteorites could trigger these plumes of water.

But Benna's team was able to see something that had not been confirmed yet. It's "the first time this has been observed in practice," he said.

And because scientists have confirmed it on an airless body, they can now infer that the same process is happening everywhere, Benna said.

Although water is widely distributed in the lunar soil, it is widely spread. The moon is pretty dry. One ton of regolith (soft soil layer and deposits of solid rocks on the lunar source) produces only 16 oz. of water, the amount in a bottle of average water.

The study shows that the moon is not so calm and desolate

By showing that the moon is simply a fixed globe, such studies give us a new portrait of the moon as a living rocky world of dynamic geological and chemical processes.

Benna recounted that he remembered looking at the moon as a boy and thinking of the distant and ancient orb as being "silent and desolate".

But this study tells him and millions of boys and girls a different story.

"What excites me," said Benna, is that the study shows that the moon is changing, reacting to its celestial neighborhood not over decades or centuries, but "over days and even days." # 39; hours "

"Looks are misleading," said Benna. "The moon is active."

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