NASA Finds Water on the Sunny Side of the Moon

NASA Rediscovers 1976 Soviet Union’s Luna 24 Probe Discovery

According to NASA, scientists at the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) detected water molecules (H2O) in Clavius Crater, on the moon’s southern hemisphere in 2020. Rediscovering what the Soviet Union discovered in 1976 with their Luna 24 probe.

NASA's report notes the concentration to be roughly 100 to 412 parts per million, or the equivalent of a 12-ounce water bottle in a cubic meter of soil. That’s 100 times less moisture than can be found in the Sahara Desert.

“We had indications that H2O – the familiar water we know – might be present on the sunlit side of the Moon,” Paul Hertz, director of the Astrophysics Division in the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters, said in the news release. “Now we know it is there. This discovery challenges our understanding of the lunar surface and raises intriguing questions about resources relevant for deep space exploration.”

One paper published in 1978 in Geokhimiia (Geochemistry), the monthly scientific journal of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, pretty definitively declared it had discovered water on the lunar surface in the Mare Crisium crater. While it’s titled “Possible Water in Luna 24 Regolith from the Sea of Crises” in the English edition of the publication, the article by M.V. Akhmanova, B.V. Dementyev & M.N. Markov makes definitive claims about having discovered water.

According to Arlin Crotts, who was an astronomy professor at Columbia University until his death in 2015, the trio tested soil samples brought from the moon back to Earth by the Luna 24 probe. That probe had drilled two meters down into Mare Crisium and extracted 170 grams of lunar soil. By using infrared absorption spectroscopy, they proved the lunar soil was composed of roughly 0.1% water by mass, with more water appearing further below the surface you went.

Could it be time to stop and look at past discoveries across the globe?