Lightning hits new NASA rocket at the heart of new moon mission
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NASA astronomers made a stunning find back in 2018 when they came across the first-ever evidence of water ice on the Moon. The ice was found lingering in the darkest and coldest parts of the Moon’s polar regions The ice deposits are patchily distributed and could have been there for millions of years.
At the southern pole, the majority of the ice is concentrated at lunar craters, while the northern pole’s ice is more widely, but sparsely spread.
Today, the ice covering the bottom of craters at the Moon’s north and south poles still remains, even though it is exposed to solar wind.
Solar wind brings waves of charged particles that blast out of the sun at hundreds of miles a second.
But the polar ice has been untouched by the sun’s rays, possibly for millions of years.
That is despite the fact that the ionized wind that catapults out the sun being highly erosive, which one might expect would cause the ice to melt.
This would appear even more likely as the Moon, unlike the Blue Planet, does not have a magnetic shield to protect it from the sun’s charged particles.
But a map of the Moon’s magnetic anomalies might help to explain why this ice has been preserved.
The map was presented at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference by scientists from the University of Arizona last month.
Back in the 1970s, THE Apollo 15 and 16 missions first detected these anomalies,
These are thought to be remnants of the Moon’s ancient magnetic shield, which NASA believes to have vanished billions of years ago.
These anomalies reportedly with a number of big polar craters, some of which contain ancient ice deposits.
The researchers say that these anomalies act as tiny magnetic shields, batting away the solar wind that would have otherwise melted the ice.
Lon Hood, a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona, told Live Science: “These anomalies can deflect the solar wind.
“We think they could be quite significant in shielding the permanently shadowed regions.”
The researchers’ 12 regional maps of the lunar south pole were recorded by the Kaguya spacecraft, owned by the Japanese.
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It orbited the Moon from 2007 to 2009 and had a magnetometer that was able to detect the pockets of magnetism across the lunar surface.
Magnetic anomalies were shown to overlap with at least two permanently shadowed craters on the lunar south pole, known as the Shoemaker and Sverdrup craters.
The researchers said these can “significantly deflect the ion bombardment” of solar wind, despite only being microscopic when compared to the size of the Earth’s magnetic field.
While the research is yet to be peer-reviewed, this is currently the most likely explanation for the still in-tact lunar ice discovered four years ago.
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