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 Plans on
to land scientific lab on moon named after Prophet Mohammad:
Muslims are planning to
land a scientific lab called Mohammad I on the moon .....
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London:
It seems that the moon is not that dry as it was thought to be
California Institute of Technology (Caltech), working with
colleagues at the University of Tennessee, have found structurally
bound hydroxyl groups (i.e., water) in a mineral in a lunar rock
returned to Earth by the Apollo program.
The team found the water in a calcium phosphate mineral, apatite,
within a basalt collected from the Moon's surface by the Apollo 14
astronauts.
"The Moon, which has generally been thought to be devoid of hydrous
materials, has water," Nature quoted John Eiler, the Robert P. Sharp
Professor of Geology and professor of geochemistry at Caltech, and a
coauthor on the paper, as saying.
"The fact that we were able to quantitatively measure significant
amounts of water in a lunar mineral is truly surprising," added lead
author Jeremy Boyce, a visitor in geochemistry at Caltech, and a
research scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles.
To be precise, they didn't find "water" -- the molecule H2O. Rather,
they found hydrogen in the form of a hydroxyl anion, OH-, bound in
the apatite mineral lattice.
"Hydroxide is a close chemical relative of water. If you heat up the
apatite, the hydroxyl ions will ''decompose'' and come out as
water," explained coauthor George Rossman, Caltech's Eleanor and
John R. McMillan Professor of Mineralogy.
The lunar basalt sample in which the hydrogen was found had been
collected by the Apollo 14 Moon mission in 1971.
And the idea to focus the search for water on this particular sample
was promoted by Larry Taylor, a professor at the University of
Tennessee in Knoxville, who sent the samples to the Caltech
scientists last year.
"The Moon has been considered to be bone dry ever since the return
of the first Apollo rocks," noted Taylor.
However, there are lunar volcanic deposits interpreted as having
been erupted by expanding vapour.
Although carbon dioxide and sulphur gases have generally been
thought to dominate the expanding vapour, recent evidence from the
study of the these deposits has suggested that water could also play
a role in powering lunar volcanic eruptions.
The discovery of hydroxyl in apatite from lunar volcanic rocks is
consistent with this suggestion.
"There's more water on the Moon than people suspected, but there's
still likely orders of magnitude less than there is on the Earth,"
said Eiler.
Their findings are detailed in the latest issue of the journal
Nature. (ANI)
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