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INDIAN space scientists have found ''evidence'' of water vapour being present on Moon.Earlier, they had inferred that water- bearing compounds and water molecules were present on the lunar surface and water ice was present inside craters.Chandra's Altitudinal Composition Explorer (CHACE) has provided ''direct'' evidence of water in the sunlit lunar environment through in-situ measurements, a recent paper in the journal Planetary and Space Science said.It takes the heat off a debate on whether Chandrayan-1's Moon Impact Probe (MIP) findings were merely instrument ''contamination'' or not. CHACE is a mass spectrometer aboard the MIP attached to Chandrayaan-1. The paper has been authored by Indian Space Research Organisation's Space Physics Laboratory (SPL) scientists in Thiruvananthapuram.''It vindicates the presence of water on lunar surface in the form of ice at higher lunar latitudes as inferred by the (NASAdevised) Moon Mineralogy Mapper ( M3),'' said professor R Sridharan. The former SPL director is the principal scientist for the experiment and the lead author of the paper.M3 found signatures of hydroxyl ions and water molecules on the lunar surface, especially towards the poles.Another NASA instrument, Mini-Synthetic Aperture Radar, found evidence for ice in lunar craters. These add credence to the findings and the credit for finding water on moon goes to Chandrayaan-1, Sridharan said.CHACE sampled the lunar atmosphere every four seconds from 40 degrees north to 90 degrees south on the sunlit side of the moon, a feat carried out for the first time. Both experiments - CHACE and M3 - were complementary and provided unambiguous signatures for distribution of water along lunar latitudes, Sridharan said.Moving from the lunar equator, CHACE detected first an increase and then a decrease in the amount of water vapour.Sridharan said water ice sublimated due to high temperatures and low pressures on the moon because of which there water vapour was lesser in the poles that are cool.NASA's Apollo 17, too, had a mass spectrometer on board and it was left on the Moon's surface. ''It showed signs of several elements and a complex atmospheric composition, but the scientists then treated all of them as contaminants.'' Sridharan said.Reproduced From Mail Today. Copyright 2010. MTNPL. All rights reserved.Follow us on Twitter!
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