According to NASA, there is much more water on the moon than previously thought, writes The Wall Street Journal, noting that this discovery could be an additional argument for creating a habitable base on the lunar surface.
The discovery comes as the result of a daring experiment last year in which the US space agency launched a rocket into a lunar crater at 5,600 miles per hour and then analyzed the debris using two orbiting satellites. Scientists have found that the crater contains water in the form of ice, as well as a number of other resources such as hydrogen, ammonia, methane, mercury, sodium and silver.
NASA announced the sensational discovery of water on the Moon last November. Now, a more detailed analysis of the data is the topic of six scientific papers, the conclusions of which are published in the journal Science: the moon has much more water than one would expect, it is about twice as much in concentration as the Sahara Desert.
"It's really humid in there," said Anthony Colapret, co-author of one study and at NASA's Ames Research Center in California. He and his colleagues believe that 5.6% of the total mass of the studied soil from the lunar crater is ice.
“The presence of water does not increase the likelihood that the moon once had life, as the object under study is one of the coldest places in the solar system. But the significant amount of water heightens the arguments for a habitable lunar base from which other space missions will be launched. Water is important because its constituents - hydrogen and oxygen - are the main ingredients in rocket fuel. Oxygen can also be removed from water to provide breathing air,”writes author Gotham Naik.
But other countries are stepping up their efforts. China has pledged to land astronauts on the moon by 2025, India has announced plans to do the same by 2020. Japan wants to create an automatic lunar base within a decade, which in the future will provide conditions for organizing a manned mission.
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