Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, brain Stuff,
Speaker 1: Lauren vogelbomb Here. We sometimes forget that water has a recipe.
Speaker 1: One atom of oxygen, two atoms of hydrogen. All water
Speaker 1: was made somehow, and here on Earth. The same water
Speaker 1: has been knocking around our old planet for billions of
Speaker 1: years thanks to our water cycle. But water exists in
Speaker 1: other places too, anywhere oxygen and hydrogen atoms have the
Speaker 1: chance to find one another. The trick is, if other
Speaker 1: objects in space are going to keep their water, they've
Speaker 1: got to have a way to hold on to it.
Speaker 1: Not everybody has a fabulous atmosphere like Earth. Chinese researchers
Speaker 1: have recently discovered that our moon has a vast store
Speaker 1: of water, probably upwards of three hundred and thirty billion
Speaker 1: tons of it, all hidden away under and in the
Speaker 1: lunar soil. In the March twenty twenty three edition of
Speaker 1: the journal Nature Geoscience, the researchers reported that tiny, rough
Speaker 1: glass beads holding on to droplets of water can be
Speaker 1: found all over the Moon. Some of these beads were
Speaker 1: collected in December of twenty twenty by China's Chang of five,
Speaker 1: a robotic spacecraft sent to the Moon's surface to collect
Speaker 1: rock and soil. In collecting these samples, researchers found that
Speaker 1: the surface of the Moon is uniformly littered with tiny
Speaker 1: glass beads. The scientific name for these is microtechtites. These
Speaker 1: grains of glass measuring less than a millimeter across were
Speaker 1: created by the meteorites big and small, that are constantly
Speaker 1: bombarding the Moon's surface, exploding molten chunks of lunar crust
Speaker 1: far into the air, such as it is a while
Speaker 1: hanging out in a red hot soil plume, some of
Speaker 1: the material cools into these tiny silica spheres. While drifting
Speaker 1: through the thin lunar atmosphere, the beads come into contact
Speaker 1: with solar winds. From that name, you might assume that
Speaker 1: solar winds are pleasantly warm and mild. They're actually relentless
Speaker 1: blasts of plasma as hot as a million degrees celsius,
Speaker 1: made up of energized electrons and protons, screaming through space
Speaker 1: at nine hundred kilometers a second. I usually try to
Speaker 1: report numbers in both metric and imperial, but suffice it
Speaker 1: to say in this case that in Imperial this is
Speaker 1: also hot and fast, and this wind contains, among other things,
Speaker 1: hydrogen nuclei. Lunar soil contains some oxygen, and when it
Speaker 1: combines with the hydrogen in the solar wind, that creates
Speaker 1: water and tiny bits of this water diffuse into the
Speaker 1: glass beads before they drop back to the surface of
Speaker 1: the Moon. But okay, could this water be harvested? In short, yes,
Speaker 1: the water isn't locked in indefinitely. The researchers suggest that
Speaker 1: the spheres get covered over lunar dust, where water diffuses
Speaker 1: in and out of the beads over the course of years,
Speaker 1: creating something like a water cycle on the Moon. Releasing
Speaker 1: the water could easily be done by collecting the spheres,
Speaker 1: heating them up, and then collecting the resulting water vapor.
Speaker 1: Collecting the beads might be difficult, but even if you
Speaker 1: could collect all of them and harvest all of their water,
Speaker 1: it still wouldn't be enough to support, say, a city
Speaker 1: on the Moon. But the beads still interest scientists because
Speaker 1: they represent relatively ready access to water that might eventually
Speaker 1: help astronauts in emergency situations and for things such as
Speaker 1: creating drinking water or making rocket fuel. Today's episode is
Speaker 1: based on the article Moon's glass beads hold billions of
Speaker 1: tons of water on how stuffworks dot com, written by
Speaker 1: Jesslin Shields. Brain Stuff is production of by Heart Radio
Speaker 1: in partnership with hostufforks dot com and is produced by
Speaker 1: Tyler Klang. Four more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the
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