Gravity Blue

Yes… this is not a mystery anymore, water has been found on the Moon. During the latest Apollo missions, the soil samples which returned contained water, although, researchers are not yet able to tell the quantity of water or any method that can be used to extract water.

This discovery was made during the analysis of volcanic glass beads which were brought back from the Moon.

Moon has a great history and is believed to have formed some 4.5 billion years ago when a planet almost the size of Mars collided with Earth, and on impact, molten pieces were torn out. What eventually gave Moon its spherical shape is the gravity of Earth. In fact, Earth has the biggest Moon in the Solar System but however this formation of Moon, it is believed that during the formation, all the water present would have been lost through vaporization and was lost into the space, making the Moon, extremely dry.

This also sparks new formation theory among the scientists on how the moon evolved as previously there was no mention of water during it formation.

Saal’s research team also has doubted that the glass beads brought from the Moon are likely to be the molten drops of lava coming from the deep inside the Moon’s inner region. Also, there is little evidence that samples could have been contaminated with hydrogen gas.

“For the past four decades, the limit for detecting water in lunar samples was about 50 parts per million (ppm) at best. We developed a way to detect as little as 5 ppm of water,” said co-author of the study Erik Hauri, geochemist at the Carnegie Institution in Washington.

The ion mass spectrometry technique used by the other team in the study revealed 46 parts per million of water, inside the volcanic glass droplets, which indicated that it may hold up to 745 ppm of water which is close to the water content of solidified lava. However, the team calculated that the true concentration of water is most likely to be around 260 ppm.
Although knowing how much water is present on Moon has can have significance on future exploration but till then we have to wait for the further research on more samples being returned from the Moon.