NASA scientists working closely with the India’s space researchers have discovered water molecules in the polar regions of the moon.
Indian Space Research Organization’s Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft, launched in October 2008 carried the Moon Mineralogy Mapper, M3 designed specifically to look for water. M3 was designed and built by a NASA team at the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, California. India carrried M3 and one other American instrument to lunar orbit at no charge to NASA in return for sharing in the date found by the spectrometer.
“Water ice on the moon has been something of a holy grail for lunar scientists for a very long time,” said Jim Green, director of the Planetary Science Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “This surprising finding has come about through the ingenuity, perseverance and international cooperation between NASA and the India Space Research Organization.”
From its perch in lunar orbit, M3’s state-of-the-art spectrometer measured light reflecting off the moon’s surface at infrared wavelengths, splitting the spectral colors of the lunar surface into small enough bits to reveal a new level of detail in surface composition. When the M3 science team analyzed data from the instrument, they found the wavelengths of light being absorbed were consistent with the absorption patterns for water molecules and hydroxyl.
For the definitive news release, see the Jet Propulsion Lab site and Science Magazine, which talks about a whiff of water. And here is a balanced story on the Indian side from the Indian Space Research Organization. But the media has had a field day with this story.
For American hype about the story here is the New York Times, and here is the Los Angeles Time view. The imaginative journalists at India Today have converted that “whiff” into “large amounts”. See this. And the nationalist Indian Express reports it as a purely Indian find in the headline. Truth is the first casualty, not only of war but also of scientific discoveries in this day and age. And even a usually reliable source such as the BBC would have us believe the (imaginary) role played by Twitter. I wonder what Isaac Newton or Louis Pasteur would have to put up had modern media been around during their times.
