At the NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston, in a special nitrogen-atmosphere controlled container, you’ll find samples of rocks from the moon. The rocks were collected during the Apollo missions in the early 1970’s, and from time to time a few lucky scientists are given a small sample for research. In a recent collaboration, researchers from Brown University, the Carnegie Institute for Science, and Case Western Reserve University obtained a few of those rocks so that they could look for water. That’s something most of their colleagues said they wouldn’t find, explains James Van Orman, a professor of Geochemistry at Case Western Reserve and one of the study’s authors.
VAN ORMAN: There was a lot of resistance in going forward with this study because the thought was, you’re not going to find anything, so Alberto and Eric, my colleagues on the paper, decided to go forward with it anyway because Eric had developed techniques for measuring water at much lower detection limits than could be done before, and so we thought why not try it on the moon glasses.
The rocks, he says, are actually very tiny glass beads - smaller than a typical grain of sand. They were created during ancient volcanic eruptions and now cover the surface of the moon.
VAN ORMAN: They’re volcanic glasses. Basically little drops of lava that were ejected from the surface of the moon and then cooled during flight – and then came back down and were deposited as lunar soils.
Van Orman’s collaborators used an instrument capable of detecting water in the beads at levels 10 times lower than what was previously possible – and they discovered those tiny glass beads not only contained water, but the amount of water was concentrated at the center of the bead --
VAN ORMAN: Which is exactly the opposite of what you would get if it were contamination.
In other words, the water in the beads most likely originated from the interior of the moon, rather than an exterior source like a meteor or comet - a finding that flies in the face of the previous picture of a bone-dry moon. Researchers say if water was once plentiful on the moon, much of it may have evaporated into space. But they’re hoping some of it drifted toward the cold poles of the moon and formed ice. That’s what they’ll be looking for with the NASA Lunar Reconnaissance orbiter due to launch later this year.
Finding it would be a big boost for space exploration, James Van Orman says. With two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen for every water molecule, lunar ice could potentially be used to create hydrogen and oxygen gas that would support colonization, and allow the moon to be used as a rocket fueling station for longer trips. Gretchen Cuda 90.3.