Every night he is there, looking down on you from the sky. Without fail. The Moon, the Earth’s satellite, is the protagonist this month for two reasons. First, the crew of the Artemis 2 space mission, whose crew will include for the first time in history a woman as well as a black man, has been confirmed. The second is that a new source of water has been discovered on the satellite.
According to Phys.org, a group of scientists have discovered water embedded in tiny glass beads from lunar samples. The samples, collected in 2020 after a Chinese space mission, contained many of these brightly colored beads, which would have formed after cooling of molten material ejected by space rocks that impacted the Moon.
Millimeter-sized, almost the width of a hair, these pearls contained a tiny percentage of water. Given that millions or even billions of these beads can be found on the Moon, if there were a way to extract the water, future space missions would have a renewable source of water. The problem, however, is that this process is quite complicated.
“Yes, it will take lots and lots of glass beads,” explains Hejiu Hui, a scientist at Nanjing University who participated in the study. So far, only 32 beads found in the lunar samples have been studied, although Hui says more will be studied.
Due to the constant bombardment of space rocks that our satellite suffers, the finding shows that “water can be recharged on the lunar surface” and that these pearls could be, in the future, “a new water reservoir on the Moon”.
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