Moon Water

Icy, early asteroids may have been the source of water buried deep inside the Moon, researchers have claimed.

16:35 01 June 2016

An international team that analysed the chemistry of Apollo mission samples with various types of space rock has found that a smattering of water is buried deep inside the moon. Their study found that early asteroids were the likely source of most of the water and that the Moon’s ability to develop crust is the reason why the water was trapped in the cooling magma.

 

Dr Jessica Barnes from the Open University in the UK, first author of the new paper in Nature Communications, explained: "It's not pools of water, it's not lakes of water, it's not frozen ice. When we're talking about interior - or magmatic - water, we're talking about water that is locked up in minerals," 

 

"We've taken an approach that's the most quantitative so far, in terms of deciphering which types of objects would have been impacting the Moon," 

 

"Our conclusion is it was mostly water-rich asteroids and very, very little contribution from comets," 

 

She added: "These are asteroids that didn't go through differentiation to have a core, a mantle and a crust like the Earth and the Moon. They contain a lot of water and a lot of organic molecules."

 

"We think that the movement of Jupiter and the outer planets, settling into their orbits that they're in today, disrupted the asteroid belt. It would've been very chaotic and you would have had lots of objects flying through the Solar System, impacting the inner planets.

 

"We're in quite a quiet time at the moment, compared to what happened very early on."