Scientists using the data of the Chandrayaan-1 mission have explained the reason for the origin of water ice discovered in the permanently shaded regions on the Moon.
Analyzing the remote sensing data, scientists discovered that high energy electrons from the Earth may be forming water on the Moon, concluded the University of Hawai'i (UH) at Manoa in the US.
Data from Chandrayaan-1 was collected in 2008-2009 by the Moon Mineralogy Mapper.
The study published in the journal Nature Astronomy said that high-energy electrons in our planet’s plasma sheet are contributing to weathering processes on the lunar surface and may have even aided the formation of water there.
The plasma sheet is an area of trapped charged particles within the magnetosphere, part of the space around Earth controlled by its magnetic field.
Understanding the origin of water on the Moon's surface is important for scientists as it could help future space exploration.
The magnetosphere plays an important role in protecting Earth from space weather and direct radiation from the Sun. The solar wind pushes this magnetosphere and reshapes it, making a long tail, and the plasma sheet in this tail region of the magnetosphere contains high-energy electrons and ions from the Earth and from the solar wind.
"This provides a natural laboratory for studying the formation processes of lunar surface water. When the Moon is outside of the magnetotail, the lunar surface is bombarded with solar wind. Inside the magnetotail, there are almost no solar wind protons, and water formation was expected to drop to nearly zero," said Shuai Li, an assistant researcher at the UH Manoa School of Ocean.
For a general understanding, magnetotail is the part of a planet's magnetosphere that is elongated in the direction of the solar wind (i.e. away from the Sun). The Earth's magnetotail (the geotail) extends beyond the Moon's orbit.