Hyderabad, August 21: Chandrayaan-I has got a victory while exploring Moon as it has found frozen water deposits in the darkest and coldest parts of the Moon's Polar Regions. According to the study published in the journal PNAS, the ice deposits are patchily distributed and could possibly be ancient.
Using data from the spacecraft that was launched by India 10 years ago NASA on Tuesday said that scientists used data from NASA's Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3) instrument aboard the Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft, launched in 2008 by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), to identify three specific signatures that definitively prove there is water ice at the surface of the Moon.
The study said with enough ice sitting at the surface within the top few millimeters water would possibly be accessible as a resource for future expeditions to explore and even stay on the Moon.
Most of the newfound water ice lies in the shadows of craters near the poles, where the warmest temperatures never reach above -156 degrees Celsius.
Previous observations indirectly found possible signs of surface ice at the lunar South Pole, but these could have been explained by other phenomena, such as unusually reflective lunar soil.
With enough ice sitting at the surface – within the top few millimeters – water would possibly be accessible as a resource for future expeditions to explore and even stay on the Moon, and potentially easier to access than the water detected beneath the Moon’s surface.