page_title: Moon Mineralogy Mapper
section_title: Water discovered on Moon
hierarchical_section_title: Moon Mineralogy Mapper / Science Team / Water discovered on Moon
caption_attribution_description: English: These images show a very young lunar crater on the side of the moon that faces away from Earth, as viewed by NASA's Moon Mineralogy Mapper on the Indian Space Research Organization's Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft. On the left is an image showing brightness at shorter infra-red wavelengths. On the right, the distribution of water-rich minerals (light blue) is shown around a small crater. Both water- and hydroxyl-rich materials were found to be associated with material ejected from the crater.
context_page_description: The Moon Mineralogy Mapper is one of two instruments that NASA contributed to India's first mission to the Moon, Chandrayaan-1, launched October 22, 2008. It is an imaging spectrometer, and the team is led by Principal investigator Carle Pieters of Brown University, and managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
context_section_description: On September 24, 2009, Science magazine reported that NASA's Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M³) on Chandrayaan-1 had detected water on the Moon. But, on 25 September 2009, ISRO announced that the MIP, another instrument on-board Chandrayaan-1 also had discovered water on the Moon just before impact and had discovered it before M³. The announcement of this discovery was not made until NASA confirmed it.
  M³ detected absorption features near 2.8-3.0 µm on the surface of the Moon. For silicate bodies, such features are typically attributed to OH- and/or H₂O-bearing materials. On the Moon, the feature is seen as a widely distributed absorption that appears strongest at cooler high latitudes and at several fresh feldspathic craters. The general lack of correlation of this feature in sunlit M³ data with neutron spectrometer H abundance data suggests that the formation and retention of OH and H₂O is an ongoing surficial process. OH/H₂O production processes may feed polar cold traps and make the lunar regolith a candidate source of volatiles for human exploration.
  The Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M³), an imaging spectrometer, was one of the 11 instruments on board Chandrayaan-I that came to a premature end on August 29. M³ was aimed at providing the first mineral map of the entire lunar surface.
  Lunar scientists have for decades contended with the possibility of water repositories. They are now increasingly "confident that the decades-long debate is over," a report says. "The moon, in fact, has water in all sorts of places; not just locked up in minerals, but scattered throughout the broken-up surface, and, potentially, in blocks or sheets of ice at depth." The results from the NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter are also "offering a wide array of watery signals." 
  The detailed analysis of the full set of Moon Mineralogy Mapper data in 2018 has yielded multiple locations with water ice concentrations at the surface ranging from 2% to 30%, at latitudes above 70 degrees. Surprisingly, some of the known "cold traps", including the impact site of the LCROSS spent stage, have failed to detect surface ice.
caption: These images show water in a very young lunar crater on the side of the Moon that faces away from Earth.
exif: {"Image PhotometricInterpretation": "2", "Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image Tag 0x0000": "0", "Image YResolution": "72", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop CS Windows", "Image DateTime": "2009:09:23 11:31:40", "Image ExifOffset": "176", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "314", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "6167", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "630", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "390"}