A team of Chinese scientists has discovered that impact glass beads found on lunar soil by the Chang’e 5 (CE5) mission contain some water. This is reflected by the group led by Professor Sen Hu, from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, in an article published in the journal ‘Nature Geoscience‘.
Lunar surface water attracts great interest from the scientific community due to its potential to be used ‘in situ’ in future space exploration missions. According to the study, those crystals probably constitute a new water reservoir on the moonwhich registers the entry and exit of water derived from the solar wind and acts as a buffer for the water cycle on the lunar surface.
Numerous lunar missions have already confirmed the presence of structural water or in the form of ice on the Moon, so there is hardly any doubt that the satellite contains the element on its surface, although to a much lesser extent than Earth.
Scientists believe that there must be water reserves yet to be identified that have the capacity to buffer the lunar surface water cycle, that is, they can retain water on the satellite and prevent it from escaping into space. One of the researchers on the Chinese team, Huicun He, proposed that these impact crystals, a ubiquitous presence in the lunar soil, could be a candidate for investigation of these “unidentified water layers or reserves“.
The crystals collected by the aforementioned CE5 mission – which landed on the moon in December 2020 to collect lunar samples before returning to Earth – have “homogeneous chemical compositions and smooth surfaces”. They are characterized by their abundance of water and their composition reflects that this probably comes from solar winds. These impact crystals “acted like a sponge to buffer the lunar surface water cycle“, according to the researchers’ conclusions.
“These findings indicate that impact crystals on the surface of the Moon and other airless bodies in the Solar System are capable of storing water derived from solar winds and releasing it into spacesays Professor Hu.