Tag: Chandrayaan-1

Water in the Lunar Desert

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The environment on the moon is pretty boring.  Rocks, dust, and craters as far as the eye can see in all directions.  Untouched for billions of years, save for meteors and a few recent visits by a blue neighbour.  In 2009, the cold, dry surface of the moon was found to harbour trace amounts of water.  Now, less than a decade later, the first map of lunar water has been produced. The map was produced with data taken by NASA’s Moon Mineralogy Mapper, which flew aboard India’s Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft, the craft that discovered the water in 2009, along with a similar...

Unique Process Formed a Strange Lunar Dome

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We tend to think of the Moon as a boring old rock.  “We’ve been there, so we know all there is to know, onto the next one.” But the Moon still holds secrets, and has its surprises.  The formation of the Moon through collision of proto-Earth with a Mars-sized object is an idea that can give us a lot of insight into how the Earth formed and what raw materials we started with.  But of course to study it we have to see what the Moon is made of in addition to what the Earth’s rocks contain. In recent years,...