"It's raining... on the Moon?! Scientists have discovered that water is being released on the lunar surface during meteor showers" NASA tweeted along with a video.
The NASA scientists have confirmed that the water is being released on the lunar surface during the meteor showers. The meteor is a piece of rock or other matter from space that produces bright light as it travels through the atmosphere.
To confirm the same, a four-minute video 'Water Released from Moon' was published by NASA Goddard, space institute run by the organisation. India's Chandrayaan 1 was the first lunar mission launched in 2008 by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO). It was the first spacecraft that discovered water on the moon in 2018. The data showed evidence for frozen water "in the exosphere of Moon, on the surface of Moon and also sub-surface (tens of meters deep)," said the ISRO in a statement.
"The first definitive discovery of water was made in 2008 by the Indian mission Chandrayaan 1 which detected hydroxyl molecules spread across the lunar surface and concentrated at the pole," says the narrator of the video.
"Streams of meteoroids striking the Moon infuse the thin lunar atmosphere were short-lived water vapour," said a researcher from NASA,
"There is evidence that the Moon has water (H2O) and hydroxyl, a more reactive relative H2O. But debates continue about the origins of the water, whether it is widely distributed and how much be present," says NASA, adding that lunar's surface is extremely dry. “This concentration is much drier than the driest terrestrial soil and is consistent with earlier studies. It is so dry that one would need to process more than a metric ton of regolith in order to collect 16 ounces of water.”
On September 25, 2009, the ISRO had discovered water on the Moon but it was not made public until NASA confirmed it.
In 2009, just nine months after the lunar mission was launched, the Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft began facing some technical glitches and stopped sending radio signals and lost contact. The ISRO had expected the spacecraft will stay in the spacecraft for 1000 days and it will be crashed in the lunar surface in late 2012 but it was still in the orbit till 2016.
The ISRO officially declared the mission as over and said that they have achieved 95% of its planned objectives in less than a year.
Chandrayaan-2, India's second lunar mission, is expected to be launched in July 2019 and will land on the moon in September 2019. It will make India the fourth country in the world to soft-land on the moon, a feat achieved by the space agencies of the US, Russian and China until now.
