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Formation of lunar surface water associated with high-energy electrons in Earth’s magnetotail

Nature Astronomy volume 7, pages 1427–1435 (2023)Cite this article

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Abstract

Solar wind implantation is thought to be one of the primary mechanisms in the formation of water (OH/H2O) on the surface of the Moon and possibly on the surface of other airless bodies. The lunar nearside spends ~27% of its daytime in Earth’s magnetotail where the solar wind flux is reduced by as much as ~99%. However, no correlated decrease in surficial water content has yet been seen on the lunar nearside. Here we report abundance observations of lunar surficial water on the nearside at different stages during the Moon’s passage through Earth’s magnetotail. We find that the water abundance at lunar mid-latitudes substantially increases in the dusk and dawn magnetosheath when the solar wind flux increases, yet remains nearly constant across the central magnetotail. We suggest that although we have confirmed the importance of the solar wind as a major source of fast water production on the Moon, hitherto unobserved properties of the plasma sheet properties may also play an important role.

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Fig. 1: Configurations of Earth’s magnetotail and a profile of the solar wind ion flux measured by the ARTEMIS mission.
Fig. 2: The diurnal trend for water contents in regions in the magnetosheath strongly deviates from that in regions in the undisturbed solar wind before the local-time correction in the mid-latitude zone.
Fig. 3: Repeat observations of water contents in the same regions for different lunar phases.
Fig. 4: Typical ion and electron differential number fluxes for the solar wind, magnetosheath, plasma sheet and magnetotail lobes as observed by the ARTEMIS mission.

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Data availability

The Moon Mineralogy Mapper L1B data are available at https://pds-imaging.jpl.nasa.gov/volumes/m3.html. The derived water maps and their associated local time and lunar phases are archived to the NASA Planetary Data System Cartography and Imaging Sciences node at https://doi.org/10.17189/gmce-w279.

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Acknowledgements

S.L. acknowledges the support of the Lunar Data Analysis programme (Grant No. 80NSSC19K0369). A.R.P. was supported by the NASA SSERVI LEADER team (Grant No. 80NSSC20M0060). We acknowledge NASA contract NAS5-02099 and V. Angelopoulos for use of data from the THEMIS-ARTEMIS Mission, specifically C.W. Carlson and J.P. McFadden for use of ESA data. B. Jones and T. Orlando were supported by the NASA Solar System Exploration Research Virtual Institute (SSERVI) under cooperative agreement number 80ARC017M0007 (REVEALS).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Hawaii Institute of Geophysics and Planetology, University of Hawaii, Honolulu, HI, USA

    S. Li

  2. Space Sciences Laboratory (SSL), University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA

    A. R. Poppe

  3. School of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA

    T. M. Orlando & B. M. Jones

  4. Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, USA

    O. J. Tucker & W. M. Farrell

  5. Planetary Science Institute, Tucson, AZ, USA

    A. R. Hendrix

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Contributions

S.L. conceived the project and performed the data analysis and interpretation. A.R.P. prepared the ARTEMIS data. A.R.P., T.M.O., B.M.J., O.J.T., W.M.F. and A.R.H. contributed to the data analysis. T.M.O. and B.M.J. contributed to the discussion of the role of electrons on the formation of water. O.J.T. and W.M.F. contributed to the discussion of the diffusion of the implanted solar wind hydrogen. S.L. wrote the paper. All coauthors read, commented and agreed on the submitted paper.

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Correspondence to S. Li.

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Nature Astronomy thanks Quanqi Shi and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Supplementary Figs. 1–23 and Table 1.

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Li, S., Poppe, A.R., Orlando, T.M. et al. Formation of lunar surface water associated with high-energy electrons in Earth’s magnetotail. Nat Astron 7, 1427–1435 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-023-02081-y

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