NASA Makes UNEXPECTED Discovery On the Moon | What Is It?

 

We live on an ocean world in a solar system teeming with planets and moons the most up-to-date NASA census shows eight planets five dwarf planets and over 200 moons and for good measure throw in a million plus asteroids and almost 4,000 comets now consider that two of the three most common elements in our universe are hydrogen and oxygen is it surprising that astronomers believe that our cosmic backyard is not the dry and barren wasteland once thought now science has the first real-time on-site detection of evidence of water on our moon surface and any remaining ideas of a bone-dry satellite are gone welcome to Science Reads in today's article we dive deep into the celestial pond that is our neighborhood and look at the historic find by china's lunar lander what could this mean for manned missions to the moon or even more importantly beyond it Our Earth's surface is 71 percent water and teeming with life both above and below our search for life elsewhere goes hand in hand with looking for water on worlds other than our own and that search was greatly enhanced by

 nasa's dawn mission to dwarf planet series the asteroid belt occupant is now known to be a water-rich world with a deep reservoir of brine salt in rich water about 25 miles or 40 kilometers deep and hundreds of miles wide its famous and mysterious bright regions are mostly sodium carbonate and are deposits left after reservoir water percolated up to the surface and evaporated add to that the discovery that ceres is rich in organic matter and there's a potential goldmine of new information about the origin of life according to southwest research institute scientists and lead series research author Dr. Simone Markey one has to wonder about how this world may have driven organic chemistry pathways and how these processes may have affected the makeup of larger planets like the earth

 the key is water ceres is far from alone in its watery existence though what was recently thought to be evidence of subsurface flowing of water on mars is now believed to be merely sand moving down steep slopes perhaps even more fascinating are the possibilities of Enceladus a rather small but bright moon of Saturn that is the most reflective body in the solar system NASA's Cassini mission revealed this little wonder to be an ocean world where enormous plumes of water erupt from a series of southern hemisphere ridges called tiger stripes add the new kinds of organic compounds the ingredients of amino acids that have been detected in those spectacular water eruptions and Enceladus is a prime candidate for habitability if the conditions are right these molecules coming from the deep ocean of Enceladus could be on the same reaction pathway as we see here on earth finding these molecules that form amino acids is an important piece of the puzzle that's according to nausea Kawaja research team leader of the free university of Berlin and Jupiter's icy moon europa is believed to have a salty subsurface ocean that remains liquid because of heating from its parent planet and fellow jovian moons Ganymede and Callisto and possibly many more the list of our solar system neighbors potentially blessed with h2o keeps growing now we definitely add

 our moon to this roster the key is water Apollo 15 astronauts in 1971 brought home a lunar sample called the genesis rock a 4.1 billion year old piece of our satellite the technology of the times however was not sensitive enough to uncover the water it was hiding several hints picked up by the other missions and telescopes preceded it but the first definitive detection of water on the moon was done from orbit by India's Chandrayaan-1 mission the success was announced in 2009 and extensive mapping of our moon's water has been accomplished by nasa's lunar

 reconnaissance orbiter and other missions four years after water was detected from space scientists revisited the genesis rock with newer technology and found it also contained water drier than an earth desert but still it contained water enough to blow holes in previous ideas of a bone dry moon fast forward to December 1st 2020 it took the Chang'e 5 mission to find water in real time on the lunar surface quite an accomplishment just getting there and back since the last soft landing on the moon was the soviet union's Luna 24 mission in 1976. as a study's lead author and Chinese academy of scientist researcher Li Hongleg told the china morning post it's like a field trip out on the moon the first opportunity to detect signs of water at close range and high resolution on the lunar surface Chang'e 55's lunar mineralogical spectrometer was expected to find water's distinctive spectral signature but it ran into a problem the problem was the intense heat on the surface which the mission team said initially obscured the measurements lacking an atmosphere the moon's surface temperature can reach 260 degrees Fahrenheit and since the spacecraft was not designed to cope with the extreme coal that accompanies nighttime on the moon it only had 14 earth days the length of lunar daylight to complete its mission but researchers used a thermal correction model and a pop the water signature not enough for astronauts to go kayaking or set up a water slide but still it was water so Chang'e 5 returned to earth in December 2020 with a sample of lunar regolith a fancy word that mostly means dirt an analysis showed its water content to be consistent with the preliminary analysis that the Chinese team took from the hot surface what we learned from this historic mission is not at all limited to the first new samples returned to earth in 36 years Chang'e 5's measurements of a nearby boulder revealed a much higher water content than the collected sample and evidence strongly suggests an underground volcanic source from there it's easy to see why researchers believe there may be an additional water source beneath the lunar regolith work is ongoing to determine if the water samples are indeed from the moon's interior so what now all right so we're certain the moon will likely never be the penal colony described in Robert Heinlein's 1966 masterpiece but the end hand in real-time evidence of water on our satellite surface offers an exciting chain of possibilities a key difference between the Chang'e 5's mission and its previous forays into space is that the china national space administration previously waited until its spacecraft was successfully in orbit before making it public this time the entire liftoff was open to the world on both state television and youtube marking a noticeable shift in Chinese confidence in its technology china and Russia have joint ambitions to put a space station in lunar orbit and a base on the moon's surface though they've said they will not send astronauts to the moon in the next decade meanwhile NASA's Artemis program is pushing ahead and an uncrewed test flight is scheduled for march 2022 if all goes well Artemis ii in 2024 will test everything in earth's orbit before Artemis iii lands a crew on the lunar south pole in 2025 something that has not been accomplished since 1972. among the challenges for the next generation of astronauts is having a lunar base camp with near continuous sunlight and easy access to areas of complete darkness that hold water ice Chang'e 5's findings also suggest that future lunar bay sites may need to be in specific volcanic areas in order to access water necessary for life support translation the more we know about water on the moon the better it will be when humanity's representatives return there soon so what do you think about Chang'e 5's on-site confirmation of the moon's water will this and further investigation into our satellite's capabilities to provide life-sustaining water be a boon for missions that humanity is already planning tell us in the comments and as always

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