NASA Finds "Buckets" of Water on the Moon
NASA finally announced today that the LCROSS experiment conducted on October 9, when a Centaur upper stage rocket and the LCROSS platform itself crashed into the moon’s south pole, has produced data indicating that there’s water in the perpetually dark craters in the southernmost part of the moon. IR and UV spectroscopy both confirm the presence of water. Project scientist Anthony Colaprete smiled and said “We found a significant amount” of water as he held up a two-gallon plastic bucket. Apparently, the creation of a 20-meter crater caused by the Centaur upper-stage impact threw up a vapor cloud containing an estimated 100 kilograms of water, about 25 gallons worth. That’s a significant amount.
The graph above shows the IR absorption spectra from the LCROSS IR spectroscope with a good fit for water molecules shown in the absorption bands in the 1.35-1.55 micron and 1.78-1.96 micron range.
The graph above shows the LCROSS UV spectroscope data with a UV emission peak at 309 nm, indicating the presence of the hydroxyl ion (a water molecule minus a hydrogen atom), likely formed when solar energy hit the vapor cloud released after the Centaur upper stage made a new lunar crater and converted a lot of kinetic energy into heat.
NASA science-team leaders also said that the spectra indicated more types of molecules present in the vapor cloud and the science teams are running simulations at the moment trying to fit their hypotheses for the additional chemical components into the observe absorption and emission curves.
Colaprete said that the data suggested the presence of molecules with carbon-hydrogen bonds including methanol, ethanol, and organics in addition to the possible presence of carbon dioxide. In fact, he said, the composition of the vapor cloud produces similar spectra to Centaur asteroids—at the far edge of the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter—and the Trojan asteroids—which are parked at the L4 and L5 Lagrange points of Mars, Jupiter, and Neptune. The chemical similarity tantalizingly suggests the origins of the material in the moon’s southernmost craters.
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