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By European Space Agency
Each year, cutting-edge technologies developed by the European Space Agency (ESA) for its complex missions and scientific discoveries find new life in applications used to benefit Earth and improve our daily lives.
From 9–13 April, ESA was guest of honour at the 50th International Exhibition of Inventions Geneva in Switzerland with more than 1000 inventions, which attracted 30 000 visitors from the public. ESA showcased its new technologies and applications that have been invented for space missions and patented for use in and outside the space arena.
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By NASA
Scientists have hypothesized since the 1960s that the Sun is a source of ingredients that form water on the Moon. When a stream of charged particles known as the solar wind smashes into the lunar surface, the idea goes, it triggers a chemical reaction that could make water molecules.
Now, in the most realistic lab simulation of this process yet, NASA-led researchers have confirmed this prediction.
The finding, researchers wrote in a March 17 paper in JGR Planets, has implications for NASA’s Artemis astronaut operations at the Moon’s South Pole. A critical resource for exploration, much of the water on the Moon is thought to be frozen in permanently shadowed regions at the poles.
“The exciting thing here is that with only lunar soil and a basic ingredient from the Sun, which is always spitting out hydrogen, there’s a possibility of creating water,” Li Hsia Yeo, a research scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “That’s incredible to think about,” said Yeo, who led the study.
Solar wind flows constantly from the Sun. It’s made largely of protons, which are nuclei of hydrogen atoms that have lost their electrons. Traveling at more than one million miles per hour, the solar wind bathes the entire solar system. We see evidence of it on Earth when it lights up our sky in auroral light shows.
Computer-processed data of the solar wind from NASA’s STEREO spacecraft. Download here: https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/20278/ NASA/SwRI/Craig DeForest Most of the solar particles don’t reach the surface of Earth because our planet has a magnetic shield and an atmosphere to deflect them. But the Moon has no such protection. As computer models and lab experiments have shown, when protons smash into the Moon’s surface, which is made of a dusty and rocky material called regolith, they collide with electrons and recombine to form hydrogen atoms.
Then, the hydrogen atoms can migrate through the lunar surface and bond with the abundant oxygen atoms already present in minerals like silica to form hydroxyl (OH) molecules, a component of water, and water (H2O) molecules themselves.
Scientists have found evidence of both hydroxyl and water molecules in the Moon’s upper surface, just a few millimeters deep. These molecules leave behind a kind of chemical fingerprint — a noticeable dip in a wavy line on a graph that shows how light interacts with the regolith. With the current tools available, though, it is difficult to tell the difference between hydroxyl and water, so scientists use the term “water” to refer to either one or a mix of both molecules.
Many researchers think the solar wind is the main reason the molecules are there, though other sources like micrometeorite impacts could also help by creating heat and triggering chemical reactions.
In 2016, scientists discovered that water is released from the Moon during meteor showers. When a speck of comet debris strikes the moon, it vaporizes on impact, creating a shock wave in the lunar soil. With a sufficiently large impactor, this shock wave can breach the soil’s dry upper layer and release water molecules from a hydrated layer below. NASA’s LADEE spacecraft detected these water molecules as they entered the tenuous lunar atmosphere. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Conceptual Image Lab Spacecraft measurements had already hinted that the solar wind is the primary driver of water, or its components, at the lunar surface. One key clue, confirmed by Yeo’s team’s experiment: the Moon’s water-related spectral signal changes over the course of the day.
In some regions, it’s stronger in the cooler morning and fades as the surface heats up, likely because water and hydrogen molecules move around or escape to space. As the surface cools again at night, the signal peaks again. This daily cycle points to an active source — most likely the solar wind—replenishing tiny amounts of water on the Moon each day.
To test whether this is true, Yeo and her colleague, Jason McLain, a research scientist at NASA Goddard, built a custom apparatus to examine Apollo lunar samples. In a first, the apparatus held all experiment components inside: a solar particle beam device, an airless chamber that simulated the Moon’s environment, and a molecule detector. Their invention allowed the researchers to avoid ever taking the sample out of the chamber — as other experiments did — and exposing it to contamination from the water in the air.
“It took a long time and many iterations to design the apparatus components and get them all to fit inside,” said McLain, “but it was worth it, because once we eliminated all possible sources of contamination, we learned that this decades-old idea about the solar wind turns out to be true.”
Using dust from two different samples picked up on the Moon by NASA’s Apollo 17 astronauts in 1972, Yeo and her colleagues first baked the samples to remove any possible water they could have picked up between air-tight storage in NASA’s space-sample curation facility at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston and Goddard’s lab. Then, they used a tiny particle accelerator to bombard the dust with mock solar wind for several days — the equivalent of 80,000 years on the Moon, based on the high dose of the particles used.
They used a detector called a spectrometer to measure how much light the dust molecules reflected, which showed how the samples’ chemical makeup changed over time.
In the end, the team saw a drop in the light signal that bounced to their detector precisely at the point in the infrared region of the electromagnetic spectrum — near 3 microns — where water typically absorbs energy, leaving a telltale signature.
While they can’t conclusively say if their experiment made water molecules, the researchers reported in their study that the shape and width of the dip in the wavy line on their graph suggests that both hydroxyl and water were produced in the lunar samples.
By Lonnie Shekhtman
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
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The Chief Master Sgt. of the Space Force and Chief Master Sgt. of the Air Force testified before the House Committee on Appropriations, Military Construction, Veterans Affairs and Related Agencies Subcommittee.
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By NASA
2 min read
Citizen Scientists Use NASA Open Science Data to Research Life in Space
2023 Workshop of Analysis Working Group members, Washington, D.C., November 14, 2023. Now, you are invited to join their quest to understand how life can thrive in deep space! Want to learn more first? Join our live virtual event April 17 at 3pm Eastern Time to hear an overview of the OSDR AWG’s operations. Photo: NASA OSDR Team How can life thrive in deep space? The Open Science Data Repository Analysis Working Groups invite volunteers from all backgrounds to help answer this question. Request to join these citizen science groups to help investigate how life adapts to space environments, exploring topics like radiation effects, microgravity’s impact on human and plant health, and how microbes change in orbit.
Currently, nine Analysis Working Groups (AWGs) hold monthly meetings to advance their specific focus areas. Participants collaborate using an online platform, the AWG “Forum-Space”, where they connect with peers and experts, join discussions, and contribute to over 20 active projects.
The AWGs work with data primarily from the NASA Open Science Data Repository (OSDR), a treasure trove of spaceflight data on physiology, molecular biology, bioimaging, and much more. For newcomers, there are tutorials and a comprehensive paper covering all aspects of the repository and the AWG community. You can explore 500+ studies, an omics multi-study visualization portal, the environmental data app, and RadLab, a portal for radiation telemetry data. (“Omics” refers to fields of biology that end in “omics,” like “genomics”.)
Each of the nine AWGs has a Lead who organizes their group and holds monthly virtual meetings. Once you join, make sure to connect with the Lead and get on the agenda so you can introduce yourself. Learn more about the AWGs here.
Have an idea for a new project? Propose a new project and help lead it! From data analysis and visualization to shaping data standards and conducting literature meta-analyses, there’s a place for everyone to contribute. Request to join, and together, we can address a great challenge for humanity: understanding and enabling life to thrive in deep space!
Want to learn more?
On April 17 at 3pm Eastern Time, the NASA Citizen Science Leaders Series is hosting an virtual event with Ryan Scott about these Analysis Working Groups and their work. Ryan is the Science Lead for the Ames Life Sciences Data Archive and the liaison between the Open Data Science Repository and the Analysis Working Groups. Click here to register for this event!
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Last Updated Apr 01, 2025 Related Terms
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By NASA
2 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
That’s a great question. And it’s a question that NASA will seek to answer with the Europa Clipper spacecraft.
Europa is a moon of Jupiter. It’s about the same size as Earth’s Moon, but its surface looks very different. The surface of Europa is covered with a layer of ice, and below that ice, we think there’s a layer of liquid water with more water than all of Earth’s oceans combined.
So because of this giant ocean, we think that Europa is actually one of the best places in the solar system to look for life beyond the Earth.
Life as we know it has three main requirements: liquid water — all life here on Earth uses liquid water as a basis.
The second is the right chemical elements. These are elements like carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, sulfur. They’re elements that create the building blocks for life as we know it on Earth. We think that those elements exist on Europa.
The third component is an energy source. As Europa orbits around Jupiter, Jupiter’s strong gravity tugs and pulls on it. It actually stretches out the surface. And it produces a heat source called tidal heating. So it’s possible that hydrothermal systems could exist at the bottom of Europa’s ocean, and it’s possible that those could be locations for abundant life.
So could there be life on Europa? It’s possible. And Europa Clipper is going to explore Europa to help try to answer that question.
[END VIDEO TRANSCRIPT]
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Last Updated Feb 25, 2025 Related Terms
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