ISRO’s Chandrayaan-I confirms frozen water on Moon, says NASA

Scientists have confirmed the presence of frozen water deposits in the darkest and coldest parts of the Moon’s Polar Regions using data from the Chandrayaan-I spacecraft that was launched by Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) 10 years ago. This was said by NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine.

“We know that there’s hundreds of billions of tons of water ice on the surface of the moon,” Bridenstine said in a Reuters TV interview in Washington on Tuesday, a day after NASA unveiled its analysis of data collected from lunar orbit by a spacecraft from India. The ice deposits are patchily distributed and could possibly be ancient, according to the study published in the journal PNAS.

Most of the newfound water ice lies in the shadows of craters near the poles, where the warmest temperatures never reach above minus 156 degrees Celsius. Due to the very small tilt of the Moon’s rotation axis, sunlight never reaches these regions.

Learning more about this ice, how it got there, and how it got there, and how it interacts with the larger lunar environment will be a key mission focus for NASA and commercial partners as humans endeavour to return to and explore the MOON.