Water on the Moon

Data from the LADEE spacecraft reveal that the lunar surface is periodically releasing water.Music provided by Killer Tracks: Virtual MemoryComplete transcript available. Watch this video on the NASA Goddard YouTube channel. DIRECTOR’S CUT version featuring additional narration and an extended scientist interview.Music provided by Killer Tracks: Collision Course; Ellipsis; Transcode (Instrumental)3D rendering of Chandrayaan-1 by Dan Roam copyright 2018Complete transcript available.Watch this video on the NASA Goddard YouTube channel. SPANISH-LANGUAGE versionMusic provided by Killer Tracks: Virtual MemoryComplete transcript available.Watch this video on the NASA.gov Video YouTube channel. ANIMATION - Beauty shots of the LADEE spacecraft. LADEE orbited the Moon from late 2013 to early 2014, collecting data on the tenuous lunar atmosphere and dust environment. ANIMATION - Water is released from the Moon during meteor showers, when micrometeoroid impacts breach the dry lunar surface and eject water molecules from a hydrated layer below. ANIMATION - This artist's concept depicts meteor showers sweeping over the Earth and Moon, causing the LADEE spacecraft (not shown) to measure spikes in the lunar water signal. STILL IMAGE - In this artist’s concept, the LADEE spacecraft (left) observes trace amounts of water escaping the Moon’s surface during bombardment by micrometeoroids (right).Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Conceptual Image Lab Scientists have discovered that water is being released from the Moon during meteor showers. When a speck of comet debris strikes the Moon it vaporizes on impact, creating a shock wave in the lunar soil. For a sufficiently large impactor, this shock wave can breach the soil’s dry upper layer and release water molecules from a hydrated layer below. The LADEE spacecraft detects these water molecules as they enter the tenuous lunar atmosphere, with peaks in the water signal correlating to known meteor showers on Earth. The discovery of water just beneath the Moon’s surface provides a potential resource for future exploration, and it improves our understanding the Moon’s geologic past and its continued evolution. For More InformationSee [NASA.gov](https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/goddard/2019/ladee-lunar-water/) Related pages

Water is released from the moon during meteor showers, when micrometeoroid impacts breach the dry lunar surface and eject water molecules from a hydrated layer below. This artist's concept animation shows meteor showers sweeping over the Earth and moon, causing the LADEE spacecraft (not depicted) to measure spikes in the lunar water signal. Scientists have discovered that water is being released from the moon during meteor showers. When a speck of comet debris strikes the moon it vaporizes on impact, creating a shock wave in the lunar soil. For a sufficiently large impactor, this shock wave can breach the soil’s dry upper layer and release water molecules from a hydrated layer below. The LADEE spacecraft detects these water molecules as they enter the tenuous lunar atmosphere. Related pages

A NASA spacecraft has found evidence of water ice buried beneath the lunar surface. Find out how LRO uses its LEND instrument to look for water on the moon in this video. This visualization shows LRO measurements of slow and fast neutrons over the moon’s south pole from July 2009 to July 2011. Areas of the moon's south pole with possibly high deposits of frozen water are colored blue in this map. LRO observations indicate that Cabeus, Shoemaker and Faustini craters show great potential for containing subsurface ice. Related pages

We follow LRO to the south pole and watch as the LEND instrument integrates neutron counts over the three years from July 2009 to June 2012.This video is also available on our YouTube channel. The as-rendered frames of the first entry, without the annotations (colorbar, date, crater labels). Similar to the first entry, but with a shorter running time. The middle and end of the animation run two to five times faster. An animated colorbar. The maximum and minimum count rate are far apart initially, but as neutron counts are integrated over time, the bounds narrow and then settle at a stable range. Date annotation for each frame of the first entry. Includes mission elapsed time in years. The crater label overlay. A high-resolution still image formatted for NASA's hyperwall. A print resolution still image that visualizes the LEND data using a somewhat different treatment. Since Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) entered lunar orbit in 2009, its neutron detector, LEND, has been counting the neutrons coming from the Moon's surface.Neutrons are created when galactic cosmic rays strike atoms in the lunar regolith. These neutrons bounce from atom to atom like billiard balls, losing energy with each collision. Along the way, some of these neutrons escape into space, where LEND can detect them.The presence of hydrogen in the lunar soil reduces the number of neutrons that escape. To map out likely deposits of water ice, LEND scientists look for this deficit of neutrons in the epithermal (medium) energy range.If the deficit were simply due to random fluctuations, the hydrogen map would never coalesce into a sharp image, but as this animation shows, the map of epithermal neutron deficit at the south pole of the Moon improves over time and converges on particular spots. These include especially strong signals in the permanently shadowed parts of Cabeus and Shoemaker craters, where ice would be completely shielded from the sun. But LEND and other missions have found signs of water in places that aren't permanently shadowed while apparently excluding some places that are, both of which are surprising and exciting discoveries. Related pages