A recent study conducted by NASA scientists implies that the “roughness” of the Moon’s surface and the shadows that fill it may be where solid water is hiding.
Though the Moon looks a lot like a dried-up husk, there are many reasons to believe that there is water all over its surface, as spacecraft keeps seeing and crashing into ice-covered objects.
However, scientists don’t fully comprehend how that can happen.
Since there is no atmosphere to moderate temperature over a day, the Moon’s surface gets so hot that it can boil water.
If captured water somehow solidifies into ice overnight, as the temperatures reach -150°C, it would boil away as the Sun heated it up.
However, numerous studies proved that there is water on the satellite’s surface on the Moon’s lit side, located in scorching temperatures.
Bjorn Davidsson, a reputable Jet Propulsion Laboratory astrophysicist, stated:
“Over a decade ago, spacecraft detected the possible presence of water on the dayside surface of the Moon, and this was confirmed by NASA’s Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy [SOFIA] in 2020.”
He also explained that, at first glance, the observations were somewhat counterintuitive, as water normally doesn’t survive in such harsh environments.
That led to a whole re-analysis of the scientists’ understanding regarding the lunar conditions and posed numerous questions regarding how volatiles like water can survive on atmosphere-less bodies like the Moon.
In the new study, Davidsson and Sona Hosseini, another JPL researcher, improved an existing lunar model by roughening up the Moon’s surface. They used imagery from Apollo missions depicting boulders and craters to make the surface as realistic as technologically possible.
They discovered that the roughness of our satellite lead to the formation of shadows, which allowed the model Moon to maintain part of its water and let it freely move around as temperatures heated up during the day and then cooled down at night.