Planetary scientists from the University of Hawaii and elsewhere suggest that although they have confirmed the importance of the solar wind as a major source of water production on the Moon, previously unknown properties of Earth’s plasma sheet may also play an important role.
Due to Earth’s magnetism, there is a force field surrounding the planet, referred to as the magnetosphere, that protects Earth from space weathering and damaging radiation from the Sun.
Solar wind pushes the magnetosphere and reshapes it, making a long tail on the night side.
The plasma sheet within this magnetotail is a region consisting of high energy electrons and ions that may be sourced from Earth and the solar wind.
Previously, planetary scientists mostly focused on the role of high energy ions on the space weathering of the Moon and other airless bodies.
Solar wind, which is composed of high energy particles such as protons, bombards the lunar surface and is thought to be one of the primary ways in which water has been formed on the Moon.
Building on their previous work that showed oxygen in Earth’s magnetotail is rusting iron in the Moon’s polar regions, University of Hawaii researcher Shuai Li and colleagues were interested in investigating the changes in surface weathering as the Moon passes through Earth’s magnetotail, an area that almost completely shields the Moon from solar wind but not the Sun’s light photons.
“This provides a natural laboratory for studying the formation processes of lunar surface water,” Dr. Li said.
“When the Moon is outside of the magnetotail, the lunar surface is bombarded with solar wind.”
“Inside the magnetotail, there are almost no solar wind protons and water formation was expected to drop to nearly zero.”
In their new study, the authors analyzed the remote sensing data that were collected by the Moon Mineralogy Mapper instrument onboard India’s Chandrayaan-1 mission between 2008 and 2009.
Specifically, they assessed…
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