Hi Friends...

I'm going to share an interesting and proven factor of the Moon.
US space agency NASA said a team of scientists, while studying data generated by an instrument that had sent on India’s Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft in 2008, had directly observed “definite evidence” of water-ice on the Moon’s surface. NASA said the ice deposits were patchily distributed on the Moon's surface and “could be of the ancient age”.

Photo Courtesy, NASA

“M3 (NASA’s Moon Mineralogy Mapper) , aboard the Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft, was uniquely equipped to confirm the presence of solid ice on the Moon' surface. It collected data that not only picked up the reflective properties which is expected from ice, but was able to directly measure the distinctive way its molecules absorb infrared light. So, it can differentiate clearly between liquid water or vapour and solid ice. NASA said this in a press statement.

NASA’s present announcement is based on the results of a new study, published in the journal of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. This is not the first time that evidence of water has been found on the Moon. Nor is it the first time that the contribution of Chandrayaan-1 is being acknowledged in establishing such evidence.

First confirmation

In September 2009, data from this M3 instrument was used to announce “ unambiguous evidence ” of the presence of water across the lunar surface. That announcement was made after the data of M3 had been consolidate by observations of NASA’s EPOXI spacecraft as it passed the Moon on its way to comet Hartley 2. A reassessment of the data was produced by a spectrometer aboard Cassini spacecraft in 1999. The data from ISRO’s hyperspectral imager, an instrument used for mapping minerals, also overboard Chandrayaan-1, supplemented the evidence if its existance.
After that announcement, ISRO said another of its instruments on Chandrayaan-1, the Moon Impact Probe or MIP, had produced compelling evidence of water on the surface of Moon. ISRO said this evidence was available at least a few months before NASA’s announcement.

Reconfirmation

After 2009, several studies have pointed to the presence of water, in many different forms. Most of these have used the same data sets as used for the announcement in 2009.

In August 2013, a team of US scientists looked at the same M3 data and detected magmatic water, or water that originates within the Moon’s interior, on the lunar surface. A NASA statement said it represented the first detection of this form of water from lunar orbit.

Last year, another team used M3 data and produced the first map of water distribution on the lunar surface, showing it was spread across the Moon and not only in the polar regions.
The latest finding, that of solid ice, also confirms these discoveries. The warmest temperatures never reach above -250°F (-150°C) on most of these newfound water ice lies in the shadows of craters near the poles because of the very small tilt of the Moon’s rotational axis, sunlight never reaches these regions.