A mineral that requires the presence of water to form has been discovered in a lunar meteorite, a new study reports.
The find suggests that hidden caches of water ice potentially useful for human exploration might be hidden under the surface of the moon, study team members said.
A team of Japanese scientists led by Masahiro Kayama from the Department of Earth and Planetary Materials Science at Tohoku University found the mineral, called moganite, in a lunar meteorite discovered in a desert in northwest Africa.
Moganite, a crystal of silicon dioxide similar to quartz, is known to form on Earth in specific circumstances in sedimentary settings from alkaline fluids. It has never before been detected in samples of lunar rock.
Kayama and his team believe the mineral formed on the surface of the moon in the area called Procellarum Terrane, as water originally present in lunar dirt evaporated due to exposure to strong sunlight. According to Kayama, there is a good reason to believe that, deeper under the lunar surface, crystals of water ice could be abundant, protected from the harsh solar rays.
“For the first time, we can prove that there is water ice in the lunar material,” Kayama told Space.com. “In a moganite, there is less water, because moganite forms from the evaporation of water. That’s the case on the surface of the moon. But in the subsurface, much water remains as ice, because it’s protected from the sunlight.”
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