The water storage capacity of the whole moon can reach 270 billion tons

The water storage capacity of the whole moon can reach 270 billion tons
by Staff Writers
Beijing, China (SPX) Mar 31, 2023

On March 27, an article published in the international academic journal "Nature Earth Science" stated that Chinese and British scholars measured the water in the impact glass beads in the Chang'e-5 lunar samples, and found that the water content in the glass beads decreased from the edges taper off towards the center. The scientific research team speculates that this is because the hydrogen ions in the solar wind are injected into the glass beads, diffused and preserved inside them.

In the past 20 years of lunar exploration, humans have found traces of a large amount of water on the surface of the moon. Researchers believe that hydrogen ions in the solar wind combine with oxygen in the lunar surface material to form hydroxyl or water molecules and maintain the water cycle on the lunar surface.

In space, after meteorites and asteroids hit the moon, they will melt the soil and rocks on the surface of the moon. These melts are sputtered out, and the formed droplets cool down to form impact glass beads. In the Chang'e-5 lunar samples, there are a large number of impact glass beads.

In this study, scholars from the Institute of Geology and Geophysics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Nanjing University, the University of Science and Technology of China and other research institutions, together with British scholars, studied in detail 32 impact glasses with uniform texture in the lunar soil of Chang'e-5. beads. It was found that the average water content of the impacted glass beads could be as high as 0.05%.

The water in the glass beads mentioned here is not the water in the usual sense, but the hydrogen existing in the glass beads, which can be converted into water that we can use through certain reactions. What's more interesting is that the water content in the impacting glass beads presents an obvious diffusion ring feature, and the water content decreases from the outer edge of the glass beads to the core.

The hydrogen isotope composition of the water-rich outer region of the impinging glass beads is similar to that of the solar wind, so the researchers speculate that the water in the outer region comes from the injection of hydrogen from the solar wind. The researchers also found that some glass beads had reduced hydrogen levels at the very edges. They speculate that this should be due to a later impact or heating event on the glass beads, which caused them to lose some of their water.

The new mechanism discovered in this study reveals that the impact glass beads in the lunar soil are a treasure trove of water storage, and they can maintain the lunar surface water cycle. Based on the analysis of the thickness of the lunar soil on a global scale, the team speculated that the maximum water storage capacity of the lunar soil is about 270 billion tons. Researchers believe that in the future of human deep space exploration, impacting glass beads may be used as a candidate water source to provide supplies, but the premise is that the efficiency of collecting glass beads and extracting water is high.