What was really discovered on the moon

Honniball and her colleagues have already received additional time on SOFIA for follow-up observations. This will help us understand its sources and where it resides. And that, in turn, could tell the world just how useful this newfound water might someday prove to be. Extraction will be straightforward if the water exists predominantly on the surfaces of rock grains: one will just need to scoop up lunar soil and subject it to moderate heating. If, however, the water is locked in glass, the material must be melted to release the water for collection—a much more energy-hungry process.

Jack Schmitt, a geologist who, as a member of the Apollo 17 crew, remains the only professional scientist to have walked on the moon, says the SOFIA measurement may not be revealing true molecular water but something more fragile and transient. One product of such reactions could be hydroxyl, a molecule just one hydrogen atom short of water.

Another paper published alongside the SOFIA study in Nature Astronomy spotlights an uptick in the distribution of permanently shadowed areas on the moon—sunlight-shy places known as cold traps—in which extremely low temperatures could freeze and sequester water essentially indefinitely , allowing it to accumulate into significant deposits over geologic time.

In contrast, this latest result extends the range of considered cold trap sizes down to one centimeter in diameter. The new accounting raises the total surface area with the capacity to trap water to roughly 40, square kilometers—a pan-lunar region that, collectively, would be twice the size of Wales.

Hayne adds, however, that in situ sampling by robots or astronauts is required to properly assess their actual ice content. Indeed, this proliferation of tiny potential ice reservoirs could be much more accessible to future missions, Hayne says, because they exist in areas where a sunlight-bathed astronaut could comfortably and safely use a tool to reach into a dangerously cold shadow to dig out any ice. However, harvesting it from dark, steep-walled craters where the temperature rarely climbs above C — which is where the bulk of any frozen water was assumed to lie — would be a perilous undertaking.

Questions remain, however. One is the form in which the water exists. Alternatively, tiny ice crystals could be distributed between grains of lunar soil. The latter would be far easier to extract, said Anand.

Another is how deep this newly confirmed water source extends. He also noted a pattern of linear geologic landforms, which he called the Imbrium Sculpture, stretching away from Mare Imbrium. This led Gilbert to suggest that the basin containing Mare Imbrium was the Moon's largest impact crater.. Nearly all observers had accepted that lunar craters were volcanoes because impact craters were unknown on Earth — that is, until the early s, when the discovery of iron meteorites surrounding Meteor Crater in Arizona proved that it was an impact feature.

Whenever someone had suggested that cosmic projectiles could hit the Moon and excavate craters, a damning objection was that many craters should be elongated ovals. After all, most projectiles would hit at an oblique angle rather than vertically; however, nearly all craters are circular. Charles Gifford each realized that impacting projectiles would not form craters by gouging. Robert Dietz was a geologist who wrote just one intensely perceptive paper about lunar craters.

He also noted that maria are found within the largest impact craters and that later impacts degraded existing landforms. He further stated that the random distribution of lunar craters was inconsistent with volcanism, that crater rays were likely to be pulverized impact ejecta, that high-energy impacts would melt rocks in what is now known as impact melt , and that the Moon would now be cold and dead. Nearly everything Dietz concluded was correct and decades ahead of others.

He introduced a graph showing that the depths of craters formed via explosions were proportional to their diameters, from the meter-scale bomb craters of World War II to the few known impact craters on Earth and on to the tens and hundreds of kilometer-wide lunar craters.

This evidence immediately convinced prominent scientists Gerard Kuiper and Harold Urey, and ultimately most of the rest of the developing lunar science community. In the late s and early s, the geologist Eugene Shoemaker studied nuclear bomb craters and Meteor Crater, applying that knowledge to Copernicus Crater on the Moon. This was the first comprehensive understanding of impact mechanics, including that strings of small bright craters and bright rays were due to debris ejected from hypervelocity impact events.

With fellow geologist R. Hackmann, Shoemaker compiled a geologic map of Copernicus and adjacent Mare Imbrium, establishing a system of lunar stratigraphy, which was later used across the solar system. As a graduate student, William K.

Hartmann made the final major discoveries before Apollo Apollo 17 astronaut and geologist Harrison Schmitt discovered orange-colored soil near the mission's Taurus-Littrow landing site in , prompting excitement from both Schmitt and his moonwalk colleague, Gene Cernan. Lunar geologists eventually concluded that the orange soil was created during an explosive volcanic eruption 3. Chang'e-4 launched in early December , and made the first-ever soft landing on the far side of the moon on Jan.

The Yutu-2 rover had covered a total of feet meters by the end of lunar day 8. The Chang'e-4 lander and Yutu-2 rover powered down for the end of lunar day 8 on Aug. The Yutu-2 rover woke up at p.