NASA Discovers Water on the Moon Using Infrared Technology

NASA announced their latest discovery about the sunlit side of the moon.

Though it is our nearest neighbor and constant companion, the number of things we don’t know about the moon far surpasses the things we do.

But we brought a little more light to that darkness this past couple of weeks as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, better known as NASA, announced an amazing discovery on the sunlit side of the moon. Using an advanced infrared telescope capable of detecting water’s distinct physical signature, NASA revealed that there is, indeed, water on the moon - and lots of it.

All of this was discovered as part of NASA’s Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, also known by the codename SOFIA. SOFIA is basically a modified Boeing 747SP rocking a massive 106-inch diameter telescope, PetaPixel reports. It gets up to altitudes 45,000 feet, the perfect spot for almost crystal clear views of space.

So why can’t NASA just discover this from the surface of the Earth with a traditional telescope? The problem is the lingering water vapor in Earth’s atmosphere. This makes any picture of what’s going on up there cloudy or a little bit foggy if we’re using weather metaphors. But at 45,000 feet, SOFIA doesn’t have to worry about that as a good 95% of the water vapor present in the atmosphere can’t make it up that high.

The lead author of the study, Casey Honniball, said of the findings, “Prior to the SOFIA observations, we knew there was some kind of hydration...But we didn’t know how much, if any, was actually water molecules – like we drink every day – or something more like drain cleaner.”

Published as part of her graduate work for the University of Hawaii at Mānoa in Honolulu, the research was also recently featured in Nature Astronomy in “Molecular water detected on the sunlit Moon by SOFIA that outlined the specific methodology Honniball and her team used to find water on the sunlit side of the lunar surface.

“Without a thick atmosphere, water on the sunlit lunar surface should just be lost to space...Yet somehow we’re seeing it. Something is generating the water, and something must be trapping it there.”

This is a big deal for a number of reasons and only one of which is the fact that finding water on the moon is an interesting thing to know. NASA, for its part, sees the presence of water on the moon as enabling human exploration and even colonization of the moon in the future. Though that might seem far-fetched at the moment, that vision is actually core to NASA’s Artemis mission that seeks to establish a human presence on the moon before the end of the decade.

NASA’s Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate’s chief exploration scientist Jacob Bleacher said of the discovery, “Water is a valuable resource, for both scientific purposes and for use by our explorers...If we can use the resources at the Moon, then we can carry less water and more equipment to help enable new scientific discoveries.”

Thanks for reading!