Water on the Moon

Uploaded on August 28, 2024

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Water on the Moon

The Artemis program is of great importance to Tara Hayden, a young lunar geology researcher from Western University in Ontario.

She accompanied Canadian Space Agency and NASA astronauts during a geology training expedition in Labrador.

Tara explains how astronauts' observations and rock samples taken from the Moon's surface will advance lunar water research. Water will be critical for future missions to the Moon. (Credits: Canadian Space Agency, NASA, Western University, European Space Agency/Skidmore, Owings & Merrill)

Text on screen: Mistastin Lake crater, Labrador

Tara Hayden: We are at Mistastin Lake, up in northern Labrador in Canada.

Text on screen: Tara Hayden is a lunar geology researcher. She accompanied astronauts from the Canadian Space Agency and NASA on an expedition to a crater in Labrador.

Tara Hayden: This is a fantastic site of an impact event 36 million years ago on to target rocks made of anorthosite. 

This is important because anorthosite is the main type of rock you would see at the lunar surface, meaning Mistastin Lake is a great example of what could happen to the rocks on the lunar surface.

This is a piece of anorthosite that we picked up at Côté Creek yesterday. I'm going to analyze it by the scientific instrument here that looks quite funky and it will fire a laser, which is the sound you just heard there, at the sample surface, which will then tell me the geochemistry. 

It has been fantastic to be able to be here as working towards the field geology of the Artemis program. I'm really looking forward to these samples, which are going to be returned from this program, as these will be really key for us to understand Moon's surface as a whole and the Moon's geology as a whole. 

Our previous samples that we collected from Apollo, they’re representative of the near side. We don't know is they are representative of the whole Moon. Artemis is going to be so important for us to really understand the Moon in more detail. 

Text on screen: It was long believed that the surface of the Moon was completely devoid of water.

But by re-examining rocks collected during the Apollo missions, researchers made a surprising discovery. 

Tara Hayden: The first time we discovered there was water on the Moon was 2008. Alberto Saal, and others, they studied tiny, tiny glass beads from the Apollo 17 and/or 15 missions. They were able to detect much more amounts of water than we had actually expected. Until that point we expected the Moon was bone dry. 

Text on screen: Tara Hayden and her team also discovered water in a sample from the Moon.

The results of their research, funded in part by the Canadian Space Agency, were published in the prestigious Nature Astronomy.

A large quantity of water in the form of ice could also be found at the bottom of several craters at the lunar South Pole.

Tara Hayden: The Moon's water was primarily introduced during the giant impact that formed on the Moon, which is when a Mars-sized body impacted the very early Earth, broke off material of both the Earth and this Mars-sized body, which went into orbit around the Earth, eventually coalescing to form the Moon. 

For lunar exploration we need water to sustain our lives, but also to be fashioned into some sort of rocket fuel so then we could use the Moon as the stepping stone for humans to get to the Martian surface. Artemis is a really important program. I can't wait to see the samples and see what we can find out.

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