FLASH | Thursday, September 24, 2009 | Email | Print | 
Chandrayaan-1 finds water on the Lunar surface
Kestur Vasuki | Bangalore
Moon is not a parched dry land, but it also has traces of water. India’s moon mission Chandrayaan-1 has delivered what the international scientists community been exploring all these years. In a path-breaking discovery, which will intensify search for life outside the planet earth, experiments carried out with the help of Chandrayaan has confirmed existence of water on the Lunar surface.
Confirming this to The Pioneer on Thursday in Bangalore over phone, Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) chairman G Madhavan Nair said,” there is confirmation of traces of water on Moon. It is a path breaking event as far as Chandrayaan mission is concerned. It is very significant. So far no lunar mission has confirmed the presence of water particularly”.
Chandrayaan-I, whose moon mission also included sniffing for water on Earth's only natural satellite, had made the discovery before it was prematurely aborted on August 30.
News Agency Reuter said Carle Pieters of Brown University in Rhode Island and colleagues reviewed data from Chandrayaan-1 mission and found spectrographic evidence of water. The water seems thicker closer to the poles, they reported.
"When we say 'water on the moon,' we are not talking about lakes, oceans or even puddles. Water on the moon means molecules of water and hydroxyl (hydrogen and oxygen) that interact with molecules of rock and dust specifically in the top millimeters of the moon's surface," Pieters said in a statement.
Jessica Sunshine of the University of Maryland and colleagues used infrared mapping from the Deep Impact spacecraft to show water all over the moon, while Roger Clark of the U.S. Geological Survey and colleagues used a spectrometer -- which breaks down light waves to analyze elements and chemicals reflecting them -- from the Cassini spacecraft to identify water.
Next month, NASA's Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite or LCROSS mission will try to detect water by deliberately crashing a large spacecraft onto the Lunar surface.
In Bangalore, ISRO scientists said water related data received from NASA's M3 was supplemented by observations of the ISRO payloads Hyper-Spectral Imager (HySI) and Moon Impact Probe (MIP).
The data was analysed by a team of scientists of Jet Propeller Lab in the USA, and Physical research Laboratory and Space Application Centre, both headquartered in Ahmedabad.
There are strong chemical signatures of water on the moon in its high latitudes, said Pieters, who is also Principal Investigator of NASA's Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3) instrument. The M3 instrument analysed how sunlight reflected off the lunar surface to identify water particles in which scientists observed elements of chemical bonding similar to water.
However, the instrument can only see the very uppermost layers of the lunar soil -- perhaps to a few centimeters below the surface.
ISRO scientists J N Goswami and Mylswamy Annadurai, who made key contributions to the study, were ecstatic about the findings which could unleash another round of moon missions. "Our baby has done its job," Annadurai, Project Director for Chandrayaan-I, told PTI by hone from Bangalore.
Pieters published her findings in the latest issue of 'Science' where she said that M3 results show presence of small amounts of water on the uppermost surface of the moon.
While the magnitude was not precisely known, scientists believe that a tonne of lunar soil could fetch about a litre of water.
"If it weren't for them, we wouldn't have been able to make this discovery," Pieters said crediting ISRO for its role in the findings.
Pieters said water on moon could be a result of comets or asteroids that crashed into the lunar surface, which freed up trapped water, or the solar wind carries hydrogen atoms that bind with oxygen in the lunar soil.
If it is the solar wind, that also means that other places without atmosphere in Earth's solar system, such as Mercury or asteroids, can also have bits of water. For Peter Isaacson, a student researcher on the project, the results came as a huge surprise.
"There was no evidence that this was possible on such a broad scale. This discovery turns a lot of the conventional thinking about the lunar surface on its head," he said.
Amitabha Ghosh, a NASA scientist involved in studying Mars, said, "It is a very significant finding if we ever are to venture out to set up a base anywhere in the solar system, moon is the nearest destination."
The Indian moon mission which lasted 312 days as against originally planned two year has proved Indian supremacy in the space. This is the first of the nearly 50 lunar missions in the history of the space exploration that found water on the moon.
Chandrayaan may have died a premature death but has given vital clues to scientist looking for signs of life in the space. Chandrayaan-1 was India’s first unmanned lunar probe. It was launched by the Indian Space Research Organisation in October 2008, and operated until August 2009. The mission included a lunar orbiter and an impactor. India launched the spacecraft by a modified version of the PSLV, PSLV C11 on October 22, 2008 from Satish Dhawan Space Centre, Sriharikota at a cost of rupees 386 croree.
The remote sensing lunar satellite had a mass of 1,380 kilograms at launch and 675 kilograms in lunar orbit. It carried high resolution remote sensing equipment for visible, near infrared, and soft and hard X-ray frequencies. Over a two-year period, it was intended to survey the lunar surface to produce a complete map of its chemical characteristics and three-dimensional topography.
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