Space research: This is how water can reach the moon

For a long time it was believed that the moon was too dry. At first glance, this seems to be the case, but in 2009, NASA made a discovery that suggested that water could be found on the Moon. In 2017, satellite images then showed astronomical amounts of water on Earth’s satellite, in the truest sense of the word. But, how could it be? Scientists have not been able to explain why this happened, because the surface temperature of the moon reaches -150 ° C at night and during the day, and as soon as the sun warms up, any form of water simply evaporates. The solution to the mystery appears to be the extreme roughness of the moon’s surface, with spurs and deep pits that create shadows and keep the temperature very low. But where does the water on the moon actually come from? For a long time it was assumed that it came from the collision of asteroids. A study by researchers at the University of Alaska Fairbanks published another theory. According to scientists, it is very likely that part of the water on the Moon came from the Earth’s atmosphere. According to the study, hydrogen and oxygen ions separated from the atmosphere and bonded together on the Moon. According to researchers, this phenomenon occurs only on the five days of the month when the Moon crosses the tail of the Earth’s magnetosphere. The magnetosphere is a magnetic field that surrounds the Earth and shields solar particles charged with radiant energy. The magnetic tail contains ions that have been swept away from Earth’s upper atmosphere and partly headed toward the Moon by turbulence. “It’s as if the moon is in a bath – a shower of water ions returning to Earth and falling onto the moon’s surface,” says Gunther Kletetschka, of Charles University in Prague.