Samples collected during Apollo missions suggest a wet interior, raising questions about lunar origins.
Eric Hand
The petrologist, based at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, was just 32 years old at the first Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in 1970, where his colleagues described their analyses of Moon rocks collected the previous year during the Apollo 11 mission. Taylor saw only pure metallic iron in the samples — a sign that there wasn't any water around to rust the iron. This and other results that year led to the party line: the Moon is, and always was, bone dry.
Forty years on, at the same annual conference near Houston, Texas, Taylor and his colleagues announced that they have been wrong all along. At the meeting last week, three groups presented evidence that certain crystals in the volcanic rocks collected by Apollo astronauts contain as much as several thousand parts per million of water.
These findings go much deeper than the glimpses of frozen water on the Moon's surface — discoveries that were made recently by India's Chandrayaan-1 and NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft (see Nature doi:10.1038/news.2009.931; 2009). The new studies of the Apollo samples provide hints of what lurks within the Moon.
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