Saturday 3 October 2009

Water on the Moon and Mars

The Indian Chandrayaan-1 ("Moon vehicle") has on board a NASA mineralogy mapper which found small amounts of water closer to the poles, in higher lattitudes. The blue colour in the reflected near-infrared radiation picture represents water, the green the surface brightness and the red is pyroxene (rock-forming silicates containing iron).

Although it is not a lot of water, it is really exciting news which changes our views of moon fundamentally. Close on the heels of finding ice buried on Mars (exposed by impacts of meteorites), there are interesting implications for travel to Moon, Mars and beyond.

2 comments:

Tulpa said...

I was amused to hear that, whilst the experiment was successful and the data will be looked at for months, the expected plume was not tall enough to make Fox News!
Important I guess! ;-)

Tardyon said...

Now Dr WHO makes a big deal of water on Mars!