Glass beads spawned in violent impacts from space rocks on the lunar surface have been found to have water trapped inside, offering what scientists describe as a potential reservoir of this precious resource for future human activities on the moon.
Scientists said on Monday an analysis of lunar soil samples retrieved in 2020 during China's robotic Chang'e-5 mission showed that these spheres of glass — rock melted and cooled — created in the impacts bore within them water molecules formed through the action of the solar wind on the moon's surface.
"The moon is constantly bombarded with impactors — for example micrometeoroids and large meteoroids — which produce impact glass beads during high-energy flash-heating events," said planetary scientist Sen Hu of the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Institute of Geology and Geophysics, a co-author of the study published in the journal Nature Geoscience.