Some of these may be harmful to humans,” Hayne says. “There are other volatiles besides water in the lunar cold traps. The scientists quickly discover that the coveted Moon water has dangerous effects on the human body. Can we drink Moon water?ĭrinking Moon water plays a crucial - and deadly - role in The Silent Sea. NASA is also gearing up to establish a Moonbase through its Artemis mission. That’s drier than the Sahara Desert,” Honniball says.īut according to an email statement provided to Inverse by lunar researchers at the Planetary Science Institute, we can use remote sensing data to scout for places on the Moon that “might be useful for sustained human presence” - i.e., likely to contain water - perhaps helping us one day establish a base there similar to the one seen in The Silent Sea. “Outside the, we have measured about a 12-ounce bottle of water per cubic meter of soil. “That’s drier than the Sahara Desert.”īut there may be as much as 240,000 Olympic swimming pools worth of water, constituting roughly 160 billion gallons of water. “There is a lot we do know and a lot we don’t know about lunar water still,” Honnibal says. It’s still unclear exactly how much water there is on the Moon, though NASA is sending a rover, the Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover ( VIPER), to explore the permanently shadowed regions containing water. “Note: there is no liquid water on the Moon, and so, swimming is not a thing,” Honniball says It’s also possible micrometeorites are constantly impacting the Moon and bringing with them the chemical group hydroxyl, which then converts to water. “Observations from NASA missions and other spacecraft suggest there are substantial quantities of water stored in so-called permanently shadowed regions - locations typically inside craters very close to the pole, where no sunlight has reached for at least a billion years,” Paul Hayne, an author of one of the 2020 studies and an assistant professor of astrophysical and planetary sciences at the University of Colorado, Boulder, tells Inverse.Ĭasey Honniball, a researcher on one of the 2020 studies and a postdoctoral fellow at NASA, tells Inverse water may have been brought to the Moon early in its history by icy bodies like comets, or perhaps even solar winds. Subsequent studies in 2020 have shown that water ice may be more abundant and spread across the Moon’s surface than we previously thought. The Silent Sea is a term 17th-century astronomers used to refer to the dark spots on the Moon, which scientists now recognize as craters known as “maria.” “The Moon seemed to be completely dry.” The show even references the Moon’s craters in its name. “Scientists studying lunar rocks for the first time, when the Apollo and Luna missions returned, thought the Moon seemed to be completely dry,” Russell says.īut a 2018 NASA discovery confirmed there is indeed watery ice in frozen craters located in the Moon’s polar regions. They soon discover that the substance they are after is lunar water.Īs it turns out, the creators of The Silent Sea didn’t invent the concept of Moon water out of thin air, though it hasn’t always been accepted as scientific fact. In The Silent Sea, a research team of astrobiologists, doctors, engineers, and astronauts set off on a top-secret mission to recover a classified substance from the Moon.
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