NASA finds water on moon thanks to India's Chandrayaan-1 [video] - Northern Voices Online

NASA has reportedly found water on moon thanks to India's Chandrayaan-1 [video]. India's biggest space initiative Chandrayaan-1 remains a huge success for this South Asian nation's fledgling space program. India has made strides in the field of space and has left behind a number of other countries thanks to its mammoth financial resources and booming economy. While spending by European Union and USA in their space program seems to be drying up, India seems to be opening the purse strings to give further teeth to its space program. Now in a major achievement, a team of scientists have been able to find traces of water locked in the mineral grains on the moon's surface. The feat was achieved after decoding the data collected by the instruments on India's Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft. The mineral grains were from an unknown source that was located deep beneath the surface of the moon. The instrument called Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3) was supplied by NASA and it was fitted on the Indian Space Research Organisation's (ISRO) spacecraft. The detection that is the first of its kind has found traces of water on the lunar orbit. The entire project is funded by NASA and the findings would be published in Nature Geoscience. In a statement issued NASA said: "Earlier studies had shown the existence of magmatic water in lunar samples returned during the Apollo programme. M3 imaged the lunar impact crater Bullialdus, which lies near the lunar equator. Its central peak is made up of a type of rock that forms deep within the lunar crust and mantle when magma is trapped underground." Speaking about the discovery,  Rachel Klima, a planetary geologist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, said: "This rock, which normally resides deep beneath the surface, was excavated from the lunar depths by the impact that formed Bullialdus crater. Compared to its surroundings, we found that the central portion of this crater contains a significant amount of hydroxyl — a molecule consisting of one oxygen atom and one hydrogen atom — which is evidence that the rocks in this crater contain water that originated beneath the lunar surface." Shortlink: Posted by admin on August 30, 2013. Filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed. via Science - Google News http://news.google.com/news/url?sa=t&fd=R&usg=AFQjCNF8MbCA_u6aMSt14HolwVIDRGKe2w&url=http://nvonews.com/2013/08/30/nasa-finds-water-on-moon-thanks-to-indias-chandrayaan-1-video/

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