He October 26, 2020, with almost the entire planet confined For that first year of the covid-19 pandemic, NASA surprised us by confirming that there was water on the Moon. The North American space agency has continued to investigate this phenomenon, but it seems that China has taken advantage of it.
Just a month after this NASA announcement in 2020, China’s space agency sent the Chang’e 5 probe to our natural satellite to collect samples and bring them back to Earth.
In mid-December of that same year, the device returned to the mainland and since then Chinese scientists have been analyzing lunar rocks. It took two years and three months for the astronomical organization to make a big announcement like this.
There’s water? Yes, we already knew that. The Asians surprise us with the amount: they estimate that around 270 million tons, a figure that they say continues to rise, according to xataka.
TECHNOLOGY
China discovers a reserve of millions of tons of water on the Moon
A group of Chinese scientists has found water in impact glass beads found by the Chang’e-5 mission in a lunar crater. pic.twitter.com/ILpuvdj2n0
—Ubadel (@Ubadel10) March 28, 2023
Where does that water come from?
The water was embedded in tiny glass beads in the lunar soil where meteorite impacts occur. These bright, multicolored glass beads were in samples that China.
Now, that is not enough for such an amount to exist, because the Moon does not meet the conditions for the development of life as we know it.
The aforementioned portal indicates that the following process occurs on our satellite: “the hydrogen and oxygen atoms would have joined to form molecules of different types on the same Moon. Hydrogen ions would be pushed by the solar wind, and upon reaching the Moon they would mix with the oxygen atoms present in the rock on its surface.
Experts estimate that there are two milligrams of water for every gram of lunar rock; about a thousand times what was previously theorized.
What good is this for us, are we going to be able to live on the moon? No. The point is that there is a focus to investigate in the next lunar trips.