Chandrayaan-1 finds water on moon!

After the successful launch of Oceansat-2 yesterday, India is gaining momentum to be the best in space research!!

Chandrayaan-1, India’s first mission to moon has found water on it!! It’s being said that “Few molecules of water on the moon and a giant leap for India’s space research“. Many sophisticated instruments from ISRO and NASA were used in Chandrayaan-1 which helped in detecting the traces of water molecules on the lunar surface.

The instruments used were Moon Impact Probe (MIP) and Hyper-Spectral Imager (HySI) from ISRO, Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3) and Miniature Synthetic Aperture Radar (Mini-SAR) of  NASA to collect relevant data from the lunar surface. The M3 satellite maneged to cover 97% of the moon’s surface and the remaining satellites covered 90% of it’s surface.

From the data collected by M3, it’s been proved that Lunar surface contains Hydroxyl, a molecule consisting of one oxygen & one hydrogen atom in the Lunar soil and water (H2O) molecules on it’s surface closer to the polar region. All these findings give a way for curious questions like “Is there life on Moon?”, “Can we live on Moon in the near future?”and many yet to be answered ones!!

This image of the moon is from NASA’s Moon Mineralogy Mapper on the Indian Space Research Organization’s Chandrayaan-1 mission. It is a three-color composite of reflected near-infrared radiation from the sun, and illustrates the extent to which different materials are mapped across the side of the moon that faces Earth. The blue colour in the image accounts to small amounts of water and hydroxyl which were detected on the surface of the moon at various locations.

For the complete details about the findings checkout ISRO’s website and NASA’s website.

Water molecules found on Moon