NASA discovers that meteoroids are depleting the moon’s water supply

• A team of researchers from NASA and the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory have discovered that water is released from the Moon when it gets struck by meteoroids.
• They were able to track the phenomenon using observations made by NASA’s Lunar Atmosphere Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE).
• This is a stepping stone in understanding the history of water on the Moon and how it can be used to help human space exploration missions.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) scientists have discovered that water is released from the Moon as meteoroids strike the surface.

Scientists had long speculated that meteorite impacts could have such an impact, but this is the first time that they’ve actually observed the phenomenon — but it also shows that meteoroid impacts release water faster than the Moon can replace it.

Even so, these findings go a long way in helping the scientific community understand the history of lunar water and its continued evolution as well as help them understand how water on the Moon can be a potential resource for future exploration endeavours — on the Moon and in deep space.


Essentially, when debris from a comet in the form of a meteoroid hits the Moon, it vaporises on impact. That impact, in turn, creates a shock wave in the lunar soil. If an impact is big enough, the shockwave will be large enough to breach through the soil’s top layer that’s mostly dry and release the water molecules from underneath.


NASA’s Lunar Atmosphere Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) was able to track these water molecules as they entered the lunar atmosphere. Using those observations, researchers from NASA and Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory discovered four new meteoroid streams.


One could speculate that the water detected could be a result of the meteoroids’ water mass rather than the Moon. But, the team was able to determine that this cannot be the case since the water being released is in excess of the water mass detected in the meteoroids.


The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) was the first to discover water on the Moon in 2008 when its spacecraft, Chandrayaan-1, used the Moon Impact Probe (MIP) on the Shackleton Crater located at the Moon’s south pole. Even then, it was the subsurface debris that was analysed to determine the presence of water.


See also:
Evidence of water on Moon’s surface, but terms and conditions apply

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