When you think of the moon, the adjective “moist” doesn’t generally come to mind.
Earth’s natural satellites are known to be extremely dry.gray ball smells like gunpowder Dust and ancient volcanic rocks.It’s been a long time since anyone started thinking about it. It might be the sea There’s liquid water there.
However, the Moon is not as water-free as it appears, and may have been much wetter early in its history.
A new analysis of meteorites found to have originated on the moon reveals that the moon’s crust is much more water-rich than we once thought. A team led by Tara Hayden, a lunar geoscientist at the University of Western Ontario, has discovered minerals in the moon’s crust that suggest the moon’s crust was rich in volatile elements, including water, four billion years ago.
The mineral is a common phosphate known as apatite, and this is the first time apatite has been identified in material from the moon.
“The first discovery of apatite in the Moon’s early crust is incredibly exciting because we can finally begin to piece together this unknown stage of the Moon’s history.” Hayden says.
“We now know that the Moon’s early crust was more water-rich than we expected, and its volatile stable isotopes reveal a more complex history than we previously knew.” is made clear.”
As scientists focused their efforts on the moon during the Apollo program, they noticed something strange.I could see the moon Volatile substances are significantly reduced Compared to Earth, carbon, chlorine, hydrogen, sulfur, etc. The presence of these other volatiles strongly suggests the presence of water, leading us to conclude that the moon must exist, and must always exist. ”totally dry”.
But suggestions persist that the moon is not as dry and bare as we think. Water has been discovered trapped in volcanic glass on the moon. It is also thought to be trapped as ice in deep, shadowy craters.
We have struggled to study the Moon’s volatile history because of the lack of volatile-bearing minerals to study, especially apatite. However, when Hayden was asked by a collector to examine the rock sample, he discovered that not only was the rock originally from the moon, but it also contained significant amounts of apatite.
The very rock that is named arabian peninsula 007is a lunar breccia that consists of bundles of different minerals bound together within a rock matrix, a bit like a mineral fruit cake. The researchers said that most of the different mineral types identified in the specimens included apatite.
This suggests that Apollo samples cannot be taken in relation to other parts of the moon, meaning that local moon rocks tell different parts of the moon’s story.
“The history of water on the Moon is best understood from samples from the Apollo missions, which are thought to cover only about 5 percent of the Moon’s entire surface.” Hayden says.
“We were very fortunate that not only did this meteorite come from the moon, but it surprisingly also had chemical signatures that are very important to our understanding of water-bearing minerals on the moon. .”
Although our ability to investigate the Moon’s chemistry is currently very limited, a new lunar era is blooming. Multiple space agencies are planning lunar missions, and NASA’s Artemis program aims to: Land humans on the moon in 2026. So we don’t have many answers at the moment, but it might not be long until we find an answer.
Until then, lunar meteorites provide a window into the moon’s history and where its water is hidden.
“Although it has long been believed that the moon’s surface has been dry for thousands or even millions of years, there is probably more water on the moon’s surface than we think. It could be there, we just need to find a way to extract it.” Hayden says.
This research natural astronomy.
