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Meteoroid impacts regularly release flushes of water vapor from the moon, suggesting that tiny amounts of water can hide just under the entire lunar surface, reveals a new study.
When the Apollo missions brought lunar rocks to Earth, scientists found evidence that the moon was without water. However, over the last decade, data from many spacecraft – including Cassini, Deep Impact and Lunar Prospector missions from NASA, and Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft in India – revealed traces of water on the surface of the moon. Even more intriguing, they found water on the moon's surface, not just at the poles, as predicted before.
But scientists still have many questions about the source and extent of lunar water. To learn more, researchers analyzed NASA data Environment explorer of the atmosphere and the lunar dust (LADEE), which orbited around the moon from October 2013 to April 2014.
Related: Watch two meteorites hit the moon!
Scientists behind the recently published research revealed that the Moon had emitted numerous flushes of water vapor from its surface into its exosphere, the very thin layer of molecules including the thing closest to the moon to an atmosphere. These explosions coincided with 29 known meteoroid currents that passed close to Earth during this eight-month period, including the Leonids, Geminids, and Quadrantids.
"Most of the geological processes that we face in planetary science are very slow – we almost never see a dynamic reaction at the hour scale like this," wrote lead author Mehdi Benna, a leading scientist. planetary science at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. in the Greenbelt of Maryland, told Space.com.
The researchers suggested that meteoroid impacts had propelled these moons out of the water, and indicated that four of these puffs were apparently caused by previously undetected meteoroid streams.
"One would think that we all know meteorite flow who are there, but apparently we do not do it, "said Benna.
By analyzing the amount of water released by meteoroid currents of different sizes, scientists estimated that the highest lunar soil (3.15 inches) (8 centimeters) was dehydrated – at least, and that Smaller meteoroids would have extracted more water. Beneath this desiccated layer, the researchers suggest, water comprises up to about 0.05% of the weight of the rock up to at least 3 meters deep.
"Thanks to our measurements, we could see exactly the water extracted from the Moon in a very dynamic way thanks to micrometric impacts and by analyzing the data, we could see how much water was stored in the water. lunar reservoir and where she was going, "said Benna.
The researchers estimated that meteoroid impacts cause the moon to lose up to 220 tons (200 tons) of water per year. To maintain this loss over time, they suggested that this water be present during the formation of the moon, about 4.5 billion years ago, be delivered by cosmic impacts of rocks loaded with water shortly after the birth of the moon.
The lunar samples of the Apollo Missions may have appeared without water because the water of these rocks was probably not incorporated into the rocks themselves, but only slightly coated. As such, any water on the rocks was probably fragile and hard to remember during return journeys, Benna said.
Future research could examine the true depth of deep water on the moon, Benna said. He and his colleagues detailed their findings online today (April 15) in the journal Nature Geoscience.
Follow Charles Q. Choi on Twitter @cqchoi. Follow us on twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.
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