As the search for water continues at great pace on Mars, rocks brought back from the Moon in the late 60s and 70s have shown it once existed on our orbiting neighbour.
Image: Lunar beads returned by Apollo astronauts. Credit: NASA
The find challenges assumptions about the origins of the Moon and the long-established belief that our satellite is bone-dry.
Researchers at Brown University, the Carnegie Institution for Science, and Case Western Reserve University, used a more sensitive form of detection to examine lunar pebble-like glass brought back by the pioneering U.S. Apollo missions.
"We developed a way to detect as little as five parts per million of water," said Erik Hauri from the Carnegie Institution in Washington D.C. "We were really surprised to find a whole lot more in these tiny glass beads, up to 46 parts per million."
"This confirms that water comes from deep within the mantle of the Moon," commented lead report author Alberto Saal, an assistant professor of geological sciences at Brown University. "It has nothing to do with secondary processes, such as contamination or solar wind."
In a crucial finding, the team also discovered that water decreased dramatically from the centre to the rim of the rocks indicating that up to 95 percent of the water once held on the Moon was lost through volcanic activity. The team found that the Moon once contained as much water as the Earth's upper mantle.
“This work challenges the long-standing assumption that the moon lacks indigenous water, and this result alone makes it very important to understanding the origin and early history of the moon,” said theorist Robin Canup of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, while talking to Science News.
The findings are published in Nature magazine.
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