Electrons from Earth may be producing water on Moon: Study

Scientists determined that high energy electrons in Earth’s plasma sheet are contributing to weathering processes on the Moon’s surface and may have contributed to the development of water on the lunar surface. Shuai Li, the assistant researcher at the UH Manoa School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology, was interested in investigating the changes in surface weathering as the Moon passes through Earth’s magnetotail, an area that almost completely shields the Moon from the solar wind but not the Sun’s light photons, based on his previous work that showed oxygen in Earth’s magnetotail is rusting iron in the Moon’s polar regions. Inside the magnetotail, there are almost no solar wind protons and water formation was expected to drop to nearly zero.” Li and colleagues examined remote sensing data collected by India’s Chandrayaan 1 mission’s Moon Mineralogy Mapper instrument between 2008 and 2009. “To my surprise, the remote sensing observations showed that the water formation in Earth’s magnetotail is almost identical to the time when the Moon was outside of the Earth’s magnetotail,” said Li.