Special to CosmicTribune.com, March 28, 2023

Tiny spherical beads of silicate glass on the moon’s surface, formed when asteroids slammed into the moon and by ancient volcanic activity, contain water, claim researchers.

A Chinese Chang’e 5 rover that spent two weeks on the moon in 2020 drilled into the lunar surface and returned 3.7 pounds of material including the glass beads from an impact crater, according to a paper published on March 27 in the journal Nature Geoscience.

In their Beijing laboratory, scientists from Chinese institutions examined the beads using a special instrument called a secondary ion mass spectrometer, according to a Wall Street Journal report. The beam of ions revealed evidence of water embedded inside, according to the study.

The water came from a chemical reaction between oxygen in the beads and hydrogen atoms from the sun that reached the moon’s surface by solar winds.

While the amount of water is tiny in each bead, there are a lot of beads on the moon — enough for an estimated 270 trillion kilograms of water, according to the study. That is the equivalent of 71 trillion gallons.

“Maybe it is a common feature in our solar system and a way to understand other worlds,” said Sen Hu, a professor at the Institute of Geology and Geophysics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing and an author on the paper.

Beads brought back by the NASA Apollo missions had about 47 parts per million of water, Dr. Hu said. However the beads returned in 2020 by the Chinese rover had a higher water content, 2,000 parts per million, Hu claimed.

Rhonda Stroud, director of the Buseck Center for Meteorite Studies and professor of earth and space exploration at Arizona State University concluded that the findings were credible. She was not involved in the study.

Congress has restricted work by NASA with China since 2011 because of well-documented security concerns.

NASA has not returned to the moon since astronaut Gene Cernan left on Dec. 14, 1972. NASA’s Artemis program calls for sending U.S. astronauts to the moon in 2024.

The Chang’e 5 rover returned a capsule to Earth, landing in Mongolia.

The lander carried cameras for the landing site, ground-penetrating radar, and a spectrometer, according to the Planetary Society in Arizona.

The Chang’e 7 rover is scheduled to reeach the moon’s south polar region in 2026.

  Water on the moon found to be locked in glass beads