Moon's Reservoirs
How much water is there on the Moon? This is a question we have tried to answer for many years. A group of scientists from China and the UK found that the Moon may have water "reservoirs (水库)", according to Nature Geoscience.
Over a large amount of years, asteroids (小行星) have hit the Moon, causing the soil to melt and fly into space. It is then cooled down and falls back to the Moon, forming beads (珠子) of glass. The Chang'e-5 probe, which returned to the Earth on December 17, 2020, brought back a total of 1,731 grams of rocks and soil from the Moon, including glass beads, reported Xinhua.
The international research team looked into 32 glass beads. They found that about one ton of glass beads may contain 0.5 kilograms of "water". "This ‘water' wasn't a liquid but instead took the form of hydrogen (氢) in the glass beads, which can easily be turned into the water we can use," one of the study authors told Science and Technology Daily.
Researchers estimated that the water contained in the glass beads could probably reach to as much as 270 trillion kilograms. "It's a lot more than we thought," the author added.
The study said the hydrogen in the glass beads may come from the Sun as part of solar winds. The glass beads have many small holes which can absorb (吸收) hydrogen from the wind.
This finding would be a "really big deal" for space exploration, as humans plan to settle on. the Moon in the future, a space scientist told ABC News.
① The Moon soil falls back to the Moon. ② The Moon soil cools down.
③ The Moon soil flies into space. ④Asteroids hit the Moon.
⑤ The Moon soil melts.