U.S. team finds evidence of water in moon minerals

08:01, 22 July 2010

WASHINGTON. July 22. KAZINFORM -- A team of geologists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), working with colleagues at the University of Tennessee, has found structurally bound hydroxyl groups in a mineral in a lunar rock returned to Earth by the Apollo program. Kazinform refers to Xinhua.

Their findings are detailed in this week's issue of the journal Nature.

The team found the water in a calcium phosphate mineral, apatite, within a basalt collected from the moon's surface by the Apollo 14 astronauts.

To be precise, they didn't find "water" -- the molecule H2O. Rather, they found hydrogen in the form of a hydroxyl anion, OH-, bound in the apatite mineral lattice.

The Caltech team analyzed the lunar apatite for hydrogen, sulfur, and chlorine using an ion microprobe, which is capable of analyzing mineral grains with sizes much smaller than the width of a human hair. This instrument fires a focused beam of high-energy ions at the sample surface, sputtering away target atoms that are collected and then analyzed in a mass spectrometer.

"Hydroxide is a close chemical relative of water," explains coauthor George Rossman, Caltech's professor of mineralogy. "If you heat up the apatite, the hydroxyl ions will 'decompose' and come out as water." Kazinform cites Xinhua. See www.xinhuanet.com

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