Billions of tons of water trapped in tiny glass balls scattered across the Moon’s surface could serve as in situ resources for astronauts on future lunar missions. In any case, this is what an international team of researchers led by Huicun He from the Chinese Academy of Sciences suggests, whose work was published on Monday, March 27, in the journal Geophysical natural sciences.
Analyzing samples brought back to Earth by China’s Chang’e 5 mission, scientists have found that these glass beads, formed from hydrogen contained in the solar wind, play an important role in the water cycle on the moon.
Origin of glass marbles, micrometeorites
Samples from the Apollo missions contained traces of water, but at extremely low concentrations, so scientists thought the moon was completely dry. But new discoveries in recent years seem to suggest otherwise. Spacecraft have recently discovered hydrogen and ice in deep craters at the lunar poles. Prior to that, in 2020, a team of NASA scientists first detected water molecules in sunlit regions of the Moon, hypothesizing that they could be captured by glass beads, which would explain why water doesn’t evaporate.
The intuition that this new study confirms today is the analysis of samples brought to Earth in December 2020 by China’s Chang’e-5 probe. This work suggests that these glass beads are formed when micrometeorites hit the Moon’s surface, causing the rock around them to melt. The authors of the study explain that water is ejected from the balloons on impact, but they are porous enough to absorb hydrogen brought in by the solar wind – a stream of invisible electrically charged particles – ions and electrons, essentially – emitted by our star. The scientists explain that hydrogen reacts with oxygen found in glass to form hydroxyl (OH), an ion that can combine with other hydrogen atoms to form water.
We don’t talk about [quantités] comparable to those on Earth, but we are talking about the amount sufficient to use
We don’t talk about [quantités] comparable to those on Earth, but we are talking about the amount sufficient to use
Huicun He, lead author of the study.
“We’re not talking about [quantités] comparable to Earth, but we are talking about quantities sufficient for use, “ says Huicun He, lead author of the study. They estimate that these glass beads could contain between 300 and 300 billion tons of water. The analysis showed that the formation of water is a relatively fast process, since it took only about fifteen years to reach the levels found in the beads. A major discovery, especially for space agencies planning to build lunar bases in the next decade. Future settlers could draw from it not only water, but also hydrogen and oxygen, the two main resources needed to plan a permanent settlement.
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“So for future in situ resource planning, this is a big step that paves the way for a resource with a fairly high water content,” the authors of the study note. Experiments carried out by scientists in the laboratory show that it would be enough to heat the ball to several hundred degrees and use a condenser to extract the water located there, the operation is relatively simple. An earlier analysis of regolith — a thin layer of dust on the Moon’s surface — by the Chinese team on the Chang’e 5 mission showed that the marble contains more water than the surrounding soil. However, due to the small size of these glass balls in particular, there are many problems to be solved before considering the use of this water tank on an industrial scale.
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