Three probes send back "unambiguous" evidence of lunar water
Yesterday evening, Science announced that later today, three papers will be released that describe evidence for water on the moon that is being called “unambiguous.” Each paper provides data from a different instrument, and there are some substantial differences among them, but all agree on the basics: there is a spectroscopic signal that generally indicates the presence of water, and there appears to be more water in the cooler areas of the moon, such as the poles.
Despite a flood of evidence, a single event set off the entire process: India’s nascent space program sent its first mission, Chandrayaan-1, to study the surface of the moon. NASA had some hardware on the probe, called the Moon Mineralogy Mapper or M3, that tracked the composition of the lunar surface by running its emissions through a spectrograph, which can detect the emissions specific to certain chemicals. In the infrared area of the spectrum, it spotted a feature that’s indicative of the stretching of bonds between hydrogen and oxygen. Typically, that’s interpreted as water.
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