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Planetary science

Lunar water from the solar wind

Nature Geoscience volume 5, pages 766–767 (2012)Cite this article

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The surface of the Moon is not totally devoid of water. Analyses of lunar soils reveal that impact glasses contain significant amounts of water, with an isotopic composition that is indicative of an origin from the solar wind.

During the early evolution of the Solar System, water sufficiently far from the forming Sun condensed to ice. Specifically, at a distance of between one and five times the Sun–Earth distance, the temperature and pressure of the solar nebula allowed water to turn to ice and eventually react with other solid material. Thus, any planetesimals that accreted outside this snowline from the ambient mixture of gas and grains grew into water-rich bodies. So far, the only generally accepted way of delivering water to the inner Solar System is collision with water-rich asteroids or comets that originate from the outer Solar System. For example, water on Earth comes from several bodies formed outside the snowline, that were accreted before and after the impact of a Mars-sized body that formed the Moon1. Writing in Nature Geoscience, Liu et al.2 report significant amounts of water contained in lunar soils that can be demonstrated to originate primarily from implanted solar wind hydrogen, opening the door to another source of water for inner Solar System bodies.

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Figure 1: Lunar sampling site for sample 64501.

© NASA/LUNAR AND PLANETARY INSTITUTE

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Marc Chaussidon is at Centre de Recherches Pétrographiques et Géochimiques, UPR CNRS 2300, Université de Lorraine, BP 20, 54501 Vandoeuvre-lès-Nancy Cedex, France,

    Marc Chaussidon

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  1. Marc Chaussidon
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Correspondence to Marc Chaussidon.

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Chaussidon, M. Lunar water from the solar wind. Nature Geosci 5, 766–767 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1038/ngeo1616

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