New research shows water present across the moon's surface - It turns out the moon is a lot wetter than we ever thought

By UNIVERSITY OF TENNESSEE KNOXVILLE AND BROWN UNIVERSITY
Added: Thu, 24 Sep 2009 23:00:00 UTC

Thanks to Scot C. R. Rafkin for the links.
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When Apollo astronauts returned from the moon 40 years ago, they brought back souvenirs in the form of moon rocks
to be used for scientific analysis, and one of the chief questions was whether there was water to be found in the lunar rocks and soils.

The problem was they faced was complicated by the fact that most of the rock boxes containing the lunar samples had leaked. This led the scientists to assume that the trace amounts of water they found came from Earth air that had entered the containers. The assumption remained that, outside of possible ice at the moon's poles, there was no water on the moon.

Forty years later, a team of scientists including Larry Taylor of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, has found evidence that the old assumption may be wrong. To do so, they used a high-tech instrument on a satellite in orbit around the moon.

"To some extent, we were fooled," said Taylor, a distinguished professor of earth and planetary sciences, who has studied the moon since the original Apollo missions. "Since the boxes leaked, we just assumed the water we found was from contamination with terrestrial air."

The team of researchers used a NASA instrument called the Moon Mineralogy Mapper M3 for short housed on the Indian Chandrayyan-1 satellite, India's first lunar expedition, which was launched into orbit around the moon late last year.
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Brown Scientists Announce Finding of Water on the Moon

Brown University scientists have made a major discovery: The moon has distinct signatures of water. The discovery came from a paper published in Science detailing findings from the Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3), a NASA instrument aboard the Indian spacecraft Chandrayaan-1. Carle Pieters, professor of geological sciences at Brown, is the principal investigator of the M3 instrument and the lead author of the Science paper.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] In a discovery that promises to reinvigorate studies of the moon and potentially upend thinking of how it originated, scientists at Brown University and other research institutions have found evidence of water molecules on the surface of the moon.

The molecules and hydroxyl a molecule consisting of one oxygen atom and one hydrogen atom were discovered across the entire surface of earths nearest celestial neighbor. While the abundances are not precisely known, as much as 1,000 water molecule parts-per-million could be in the lunar soil: harvesting one ton of the top layer of the moons surface would yield as much as 32 ounces of water, according to scientists involved in the discovery.

Carle Pieters, a planetary geologist at Brown, is the lead author of one paper this week in Science that reports evidence of water in the moons high latitudes greatly expanding current thinking about where water in any form was presumed to be located.
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