Earth Aiding Moon in Obtaining Water? Learn What the Chandrayaan-1 Data Says

Data from Chandryaan 1, India’s first lunar mission, reveals that water may be being formed on the Moon by high-energy electrons traveling from the Earth.The breakdown or dissolution of rocks and minerals on the Moon’s surface is known as weathering, and it is a process that is aided by electrons in Earth’s plasma sheet, according to researchers analyzing Chandrayaan-1’s remote sensing data under the direction of researchers from the University of Hawai’i (UH) at Manoa in the US.

According to the study, which was published in the journal Nature Astronomy, the electrons may have helped water develop on the lunar body.

The new discovery could be able to shed some light on where the water ice that was previously found in the permanently shadowed areas of the Moon came from.

According to the experts, it is crucial to understand the Moon’s concentrations and distributions of water in order to provide water supplies for future human exploration as well as to comprehend how the Moon formed and evolved.

STUDY’S RESULTS

One of the main ways that water is believed to have created on the Moon is via the solar wind, which is supposed to be made of high energy particles like protons and bombards the lunar surface.

The scientists looked at how the Moon’s surface weathering changed when it passed through Earth’s magnetotail, which almost entirely shelters the moon from solar wind but not from photons from the Sun.

According to Shuai Li, an assistant researcher at the UH Manoa School of Ocean, “this offers a natural laboratory for studying the formation processes of lunar surface water.”

“The lunar surface gets battered by solar wind when the Moon is outside the magnetotail. “Water formation was predicted to drop to almost zero inside the magnetotail because there are hardly any solar wind protons there,” Li added.

Li and co-authors examined the remote sensing information gathered between 2008 and 2009 by the imaging spectrometer Moon Mineralogy Mapper instrument on India’s Chandrayaan 1 spacecraft. They carefully evaluated how water creation changed when the Moon passed through the plasma sheet and magnetotail of Earth.

Li said, “To my amazement, the remote sensing data revealed that the water production in the Earth’s magnetotail is virtually similar to the period when the Moon was outside of the Earth’s magnetotail.

This suggests that there could be alternative formation processes or fresh water sources in the magnetotail that aren’t directly related to the implantation of solar wind protons. In particular, radiation from high-energy electrons has characteristics that are comparable to those of the protons in the solar wind, he said.

MISSION OF CHANDRAYAAN-1

The detection of water molecules on the Moon was made possible by Chandrayaan-1. The Chandrayaan program’s first Indian lunar probe, the mission was launched in 2008.

The researchers said that this discovery and the group’s earlier investigation of rusted lunar poles show that the Earth and Moon are closely connected in numerous previously unrecognized ways. The Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) launched Chandrayaan 1 in October 2008, and it remained in operation until August 2009. An impactor and an orbiter were part of the mission.

Last month, India became the first nation to successfully deploy a lander and a rover on the Moon’s mysterious south pole on board the Chandrayaan-3 mission.