ISRO’S place in space history
Nasa says scientists have found frozen water deposits in the “darkest and coldest parts” of the Moon’s polar regions by using data from Isro’s Chandrayaan-i, which was launched by India 10 years ago
Definitive proof of ice on the Moon
With enough ice sitting on the surface – within the top few millimetres – water would possibly be accessible as a resource for future expeditions to explore and even stay on the Moon, the US space agency says
Data from the Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3) instrument was used to identify signatures that definitively prove the discovery. M3 was launched aboard the Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft in 2008 by the Indian Space Research Organisation. It is uniquely equipped to confirm the presence of solid ice
The ice deposits are patchily distributed and could possibly be ancient, according to a study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Most of the water ice is in the shadows of craters near the poles, where the warmest temperatures never go above minus 156 degrees Celsius. Because of the very small tilt of the Moon’s rotation axis, sunlight never reaches these regions
Previous observations indirectly found possible signs of surface ice, but these could have been explained by other phenomena, such as reflective lunar soil. The M3 collected data that picked up the reflective properties of the ice and was able to measure the distinctive way its molecules absorb infrared light, so it can differentiate between liquid water or vapour and solid ice
The M3 and the Hyperspectral Imager, too, confirmed the finding with nearinfrared absorption data, where wavelengths corresponding to that of water were being absorbed. MYLSWAMY ANNADURAI, ex-director of Isro Satellite Centre, was part of the Chandrayaan-1 team