As humans plan to return to the Moon, their machine counterparts have already been surveying the lunar surface, creating its topography and geological features and shedding light on even the permanently dark regions. The biggest breakthrough, led by India's Chandrayaan-1 mission, was the discovery of water on the Moon in 2008. Nearly 14 years after the first detection, we now know where this water came from. A new study led by scientists from the University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute hints that water on the Moon could be a result of the hydrogen and oxygen ions escaping from Earth’s upper atmosphere and combining on the moon. Led by Gunther Kletetschka of the University of Alaska, the research adds to a vast pool of studies underway to identify the source of water at the moon’s north and south poles. The detection of water reserves on the airless world of the Moon will be of critical use as astronauts from the US, Europe, and China plan to arrive at the surface and build bases to push forward towards Mars. As NASA’s Artemis team plans to build a base camp on the moon’s South Pole, the water ions that originated many eons ago on Earth can be used in the astronauts’ life support system, Kletetschka said. The new research estimates that the Moon could be hiding nearly 3,500 cubic kilometers of permafrost or subsurface liquid water created from ions that escaped Earth’s atmosphere. Hydrogen and oxygen ions are driven into the moon when it passes through the tail of the Earth’s magnetosphere. The research suggests that hydrogen and oxygen ions are driven into the moon when it passes through the tail of the Earth’s magnetosphere, which it does on five days of the moon’s monthly trip around the planet. The magnetosphere is created by Earth’s magnetic field that shields the planet from much of the continual stream of charged solar particles. Studies led by NASA and the European Space Agency have already revealed significant numbers of water-forming ions present during the moon’s transit through this part of the magnetosphere. "The presence of the moon in the magnetosphere’s tail, called the magneto tail, temporarily affects some of Earth’s magnetic field lines — those that are broken and which simply trail off into space for many thousands of miles," the University of Alaska Fairbanks said in a statement. The image shows the distribution of surface ice at the moon’s South Pole (left) and North Pole (right), detected by NASA’s Moon Mineralogy Mapper instrument in 2009.
- The gravitational attraction between the Earth and the moon is the strongest on the side of the Earth that happens to be facing the moon, simply because it is closer. This attraction causes the water on this “near side” of Earth to be pulled toward the moon. As gravitational force acts to draw the water closer to the moon, inertia attempts to keep the water in place. But the gravitational force exceeds it and the water is pulled toward the moon, causing a “bulge” of water on the near side toward the moon
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