China, which has staked vast national prestige on its space program, says that it has detected the presence of water in lunar samples gathered from the moon.
A report in Science Advance says that the samples were gathered by China’s Chang’E-5 spacecraft in the Northern Oceanus Procellarum basin of the moon in December 2020.
The report says that within the samples, scientists estimated the water content of the rocks at about 180 parts per million.
The Chinese discovery came two months after NASA announced that its Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy announced that it found “for the first time, water on the sunlit surface of the Moon,” according to NASA
“This discovery indicates that water may be distributed across the lunar surface, and not limited to cold, shadowed places,” it reported.
China’s lunar probe detects in-situ moon surface water https://t.co/GFXzM4z0Sr pic.twitter.com/vlvYoiZiT5
— China Xinhua News (@XHNews) January 9, 2022
The Chinese discovery would, however, mark for the first on-site discovery of the presence of water on the moon, according to the South China Morning Post.
“It’s like a ‘field trip’ out on the Moon, the first opportunity to detect signs of water at close range and high resolution on the lunar surface,” said lead author and Chinese Academy of Sciences researcher Lin Honglei in a statement.
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