Discovery of water on Moon

                           
             India’s Lunar Space Craft discoveries traces of water

Chandrayaan-I was the India’s unmanned first lunar probe mission actually launched by the Indian Space Research Organisation in October 2008 and operated until august 2009. The mission included a lunar orbiter and an impactor. Indian launched the spacecraft by a modified version of PSLV, PSLVC11 on October 2008 from Satish Dhawan Space Centre, Sriharikota, Nellore District, Andhra Pradesh, about 80 km north of Chennai, at 06:22 IST(00:52 UTC).

The Indian “moon craft” was designed to orbit the moon for two years at an altitude of 100 kilometers (62 miles). Scientists in the southern Indian city of Bangalore lost contact with it on Aug. 29 after 315 days in orbit. India’s maiden Moon mission Chandrayaan-1 has found water on the lunar surface before the project was aborted. This lunar probe Chandrayaan-1 worth Rs 386-crore craft was launched on October 22 last year and terminated on August 30 following a communication failure. One of the mission’s main goals was to sniff for water further reveals many questions about existence of human if the water is there. Speculation is rife among space scientists that the quest for water on the moon may have reached a climactic end with the discovery of “a lot of water” by an instrument on board Chandrayaan-I.

Addressed by the study’s lead author Carle Pierters, planetary geologist at Rhode Island’s Brown University and principal investigator of the instrument, at the NASA headquarters said “When we say ‘water on the moon,’ we are not talking about lakes, oceans or even puddles,” and revealed the traces of water molecules(H2O) and Hydroxyl(OH) that interact with molecules of rock and dust specifically in the top millimeters of the moon’s surface, made by the the Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3), an imaging spectrometer, is one of the 11 instruments on board Chandrayaan-I that came to a premature end on August 29. M3 was aimed at providing the first mineral map of the entire lunar surface and thereby a report by the online space news portal, Space Ref reveals the exiting news.
Hinting at this exciting development, a recent report published by Nature News says: “Results soon to be published… will show detailed spectra confirming that, indeed, the polar regions of the moon are chockfull of water-altered minerals.”
Lunar scientists have for decades contended with the possibility of water repositories. They are now increasingly “confident that the decades-long debate is over,” the report says. “The moon, in fact, has water in all sorts of places; not just locked up in minerals, but scattered throughout the broken-up surface, and, potentially, in blocks or sheets of ice at depth.” The results from the NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter are also “offering a wide array of watery signals
“The data obtained so far from these instruments show there is evidence of water,” S. Satish, a spokesman for the Indian Space Research Organization, said in a phone interview from Bangalore.
The researchers concluded the most likely origin of the water is as a result of the so-called solar wind, laden with charged hydrogen particles, impacting with the oxygen-rich lunar soil.
“The findings open the way for astronauts on lunar missions to harvest water from the moon’s surface, according to the paper. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration on June 18 launched two probes to search for frozen water on the moon.
Discovering the substance would be like finding a goldmine, the agency said at the time, putting the cost of transporting a bottle of water to the moon at $50,000.

Colin Pillinger, professor of planetary science at the U.K’s Open University in Milton Keynes and also a co-writer for NASA about extracting water and other compounds from the lunar surface,  said that physical samples will be needed to prove the conclusions from today’s study, and that extracting water will be a challenge thereby setting up a permanent base on the moon and they want to live off the land. Pillinger said, “Technically it’s easy, but logistically it’s awfully difficult because it takes a lot of energy and if we want a long-term lunar base, then we go to the poles,” because no refrigerator will be necessary to condense water vapor that has been boiled out of the soil, he said.
For every million molecules there exists nearly as many as 770 water molecules in the thin top layer of the moon’s soil, according to today’s paper. According to the data gathered by the Moon Mineralogy Mapper M3 instrument from Inda’s chandrayaan-1 craft, Brown University said in a statement the concerned proportion could be as high as 1,000 per million.
 This the link for news updated so far about the traces of water on Moon..

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