Researchers create first global map of water in Moon's soil

The study, published in Science Advances, builds on

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the initial discovery in 2009 of water and a related molecule—hydroxyl, which consists of one atom each of hydrogen and oxygen—in the lunar soil. The latest study uses a new calibration of data taken from NASA's Moon Mineralogy Mapper, which flew aboard India's Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft, to quantify how much water is present on a global scale.

"The signature of water is present nearly everywhere on the lunar surface, not limited to the polar regions as previously reported," said the study's lead author, Shuai Li, who performed the work while a Ph.D. student at Brown University and is now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Hawaii. "The amount of water increases toward the poles and does not show significant difference among distinct compositional terrains."

Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2017-09-global-moon-soil.html#jCp