NASAのインスタグラム(nasagoddard) - 11月8日 22時24分

💧🌙 Last month we announced that — for the first time! — molecular water was discovered on a sunlit surface of the Moon, in the area surrounding Clavius crater. This suggests water may be distributed across the lunar surface, and not limited to cold, shadowed places. But how did we get to this new finding?

We asked Dr. Casey Honniball, the lead author on the results and a postdoctoral fellow at Goddard. Honniball's discovery relied on data from the @[187095228001013:SOFIA Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy].

"Prior to the SOFIA observations, we knew there was some kind of hydration. But we didn’t know how much, if any, was actually water molecules — like we drink every day — or something more like drain cleaner.

"As a grad student at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa in Honolulu, I started looking at lunar hydration. I was always questioning my adviser about how we could tell the difference between water and its cousin compound hydroxyl in our observations of the Moon. That led us down a rabbit hole trying to find an instrument that could hone in on a fingerprint unique to water.

"At the time, there weren't any space-based instruments that could make the measurements, and telescopes on the ground couldn't see past the water vapor in Earth's own atmosphere. We thought about trying a high-altitude balloon, but we would have had to build it ourselves. Then we figured out that SOFIA, which flies above 99% of the water vapor in Earth's atmosphere, had an instrument capable of doing this. It's turned out to be pretty great!"

Whether this water is easily accessible for use as a resource remains to be determined. The amount of water we estimate at Clavius is quite small. For example, sand from the Sahara has 100x more water than what we measure on the sunlit surface of the Moon. Under NASA’s Artemis program, the agency is eager to learn all it can about the presence of water on the Moon in advance of sending the 1st woman & next man to the lunar surface in 2024.

📽️: Clavius crater in the Moon’s southern hemisphere; observations from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. Credit: NASA/Goddard/Ernie Wright

📸: Dr. Casey Honniball and SOFIA aircraft

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