Water has been found on the moon, could astronauts now live there?

The search for water on the moon has been decades long. It has been discovered in many forms: ice near the poles or dust on the dark surface. However, newly found glass beads could be the solution to harness and use that water.

According to a timeline about water on the moon by NASA, when the Apolo mission landed on the moon for the first time in human history, the astronauts collected soil samples that were later tested to search for water. Nothing was found, and the moon was declared dry for decades.

However, between 1994 and 1998, NASA confirmed that there was ice on the moon's dark side thanks to the Clementine mission: a satellite that orbited it and documented its surface.

Later, in 2020, as their timeline explains, NASA confirmed there was also water on the sunlit surface of the moon. The SOFIA observatory revealed that this life-sustaining element is concentrated in the Clavius crater.

In 2023, UK scientists analyzed samples of glass beads from the moon soil brought back by the Chinese probe Chang'e-5. According to their publication in Nature's Geoscience journal, these beads, known as spherules, are formed in the heat of a meteoroid crash's aftermath.

The researchers suggested hydrogen from the sun combined with oxygen inside these glass beams can create water. "The hydrogen, and therefore water, on the content of these glasses, is remarkably high," said Sara Russell, one of the authors, to NewScientist at the Natural History Museum in London.

Meteoroids constantly crash on the moon's surface because it has no atmosphere, according to the expert's explanations. The difference from when it happens on Earth is that the atmosphere disintegrates meteoroids and turns them into harmless meteorites.

Since meteoroid crashes are so common on the lunar surface, the research team estimated that these glass beads could store around 300 billion tons of water within them.

The amount is not surprising: it is roughly the same amount of water found in ice form on the lunar poles, craters, and the dark side, as discovered by NASA in the past decades.

However, these glass beads are easier to access than the water stored in craters or the dark side of the moon, according to the authors of the study.

"I think it is going to be of quite some interest for those planning to send missions to the moon to extract resources such as water for enabling more sustainable and longer-term exploration," Mahesh Anand, one of the authors, told NewScientist.

Extracting the water could be very simple, Anand explained to the magazine. Right now, at the daylight temperature of the moon, some water appears to be naturally pouring out of the beads, he said.

"It shouldn't be too difficult to actually heat this material and expect that some water would be released," Anand said, suggesting the method astronauts could use to collect the water for future missions.

His colleague, Sara Russell, also explained that these beads, or spherules, are present in other celestial bodies of the galaxy. That indicates that it could be a common water storage system in the solar system.

The NASA timeline also shows that, in 2023, a group of researchers designed a map of the water distribution of the moon using data from NASA's SOFIA observatory. The work showed how water might be moving through the lunar surface. It extends to the south pole.

The south pole is precisely the study target of the Artemis mission, which will send humans to the moon again after half a century. The astronauts will also carry the water-hunting rover VIPER. There is still a lot more to discover.