NASA has discovered that meteoroids are causing water to leak off the moon - Business Insider

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According to new research from NASA and the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, water gets released from the moon when it's struck by meteoroids.
The researchers were able to analyze this phenomenon using observations made by NASA's Lunar Atmosphere Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE).
This is a stepping stone in our growing understanding of the history of water on the moon.
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When meteoroids strike the surface of the moon, tiny droplets of water get released in the form of vapor, according to a recent NASA finding.

Scientists had long speculated that meteorite impacts might have such an effect, but this is the first time the phenomenon has actually been observed.

The findings could help scientists augment their understanding of the history of lunar water, and shed light on the ways in which water on the moon could be harvested as a potential resource for future space exploration endeavors.

"The water being lost is likely ancient, either dating back to the formation of the moon or deposited early in its history," Mehdi Benna, the lead author of a new study about these water bursts and a planetary scientist at NASA, said in a release.

Essentially, when debris from a comet in the form of a meteoroid hits the moon, it vaporizes on impact. That impact, in turn, creates a shock wave in the lunar soil. If the impact is big enough, the shockwave can breach the soil's top layer — which is mostly dry — and induce the release the water molecules from underneath.

This infographic from NASA explains the process.

NASA Goddard/Mehdi Benna/Jay Friedlander

Scientists used data from NASA's Lunar Atmosphere Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) — a robotic mission that orbited the moon from 2013 to 2014 — to track these streams of water molecules as they entered the lunar atmosphere.

"We traced most of these events to known meteoroid streams, but the really surprising part is that we also found evidence of four meteoroid streams that were previously undiscovered," Benna said.

One could speculate that the water vapor the LADEE satellite detected came from the meteoroids' own water stores, rather than the moon's. But the research team was able to rule out that possibility, since the mass of the water that was released was higher than the total mass of water within the meteoroids.

"We know that some of the water must be coming from the Moon," Dana Hurley, a co-author of the study and a planetary researcher at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, said in the release.

The presence of water on the moon was first discovered by the Indian Space Research Organization in 2008. Since then, scientists have been debating where that water came from, how much water could be lurking on the moon, and where it's distributed.

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