NASA Reveals Water Found on the Moon's Surface | NASA’s Unexplained Files | Science Channel
July 20th, 1969. Apollo 11 touches down on the. The eagle has landed. Bringing with it the very first humans to step foot on another world. It’s one small step for man. One giant leap for mankind. On that very first mission, astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin encounter something that remains to this day unexplained. There was a kind of a bright cloud existing for many minutes. Aldrin described this strange glow on the moon’s surface as brighter than anything he could see in either direction. Scientists are baffled. What are these things? I don’t know. Maybe we’re not
right about the moon being completely dead. Despite being our closest celestial neighbor. There is much about the moon that is shrouded in mystery. In total, humans have only spent 80 hours on the moon. We have made a superficial inspection only of a tiny fraction of the surface. And the dark side remains a mystery. But almost 40 years after Armstrong’s mission. Launched by India. The Chandrayaan one lands on the surface of the moon. On board is NASA’s moon Mineralogy mapper, and it makes an astonishing discovery. In 2018, NASA announced definitive proof from their mineralogy, mapper of
water on the moon. I mean, we’ve been looking for water for years, decades, until finally we looked in the right place and the
rush. Not for gold, but for water, because in space, water is gold. Experts now fear a deadly stampede to conquer the moon. And you wanted it may have been delivered to the moon. It should have evaporated right into space. There’s no atmosphere there to help trap it. And so it basically escapes. And yet the NASA probe has mapped out billions of gallons of water on the lunar surface. At the polar regions, there are locations where sunlight never reaches, especially because there are deep craters there. And within those craters are places called permanently shadowed regions. In
those locations, ice can remain there for billions of years. Scientists now have an astonishing theory as to where this ice has come from. A plausible way for there to be water at the permanently shadowed regions is that it actually escaped out of the moon. This could finally explain the mysterious mist encountered by the Apollo astronauts. If it’s gas coming out of the interior, one of the most likely components could be water. So you have water escaping out of the interior of the moon today. And that’s really exciting. It’s possible that vast quantities of water may
now exist deep within the moon, a remnant of the time when it was a hot and geologically active world. And this water escapes to the surface as gas. To find any sort of water on the surface of any world. Besides, Earth is a huge, huge discovery. Discovering water on the moon is like discovering gold, except it’s much, much more valuable than that. Besides the possibility of lunar life, scientists believe they can use the moon’s water to propel humans much further, much faster into space. Propulsion engineer Tim Pickens explains the principle of using hydrogen and oxygen
in water to create an explosion that can fire a spacecraft engine. These are solar panels, very standard. You take normal water, take an electrolyzer this device, this is basically nothing but stainless steel plates. You can use electricity and actually separate hydrogen and oxygen and they exit here. After separating the water’s hydrogen and oxygen bubbles are collected in a balloon at the top. This doesn’t look like a lot of gas, but it is a lot of power. The balloon is carefully placed on the ground. All right. Stand back and get ready. We’re going to light this
candle. Oh, man, that’s powerful. The explosion here is small but scaled up and conducted in space. Water fuel is expected to revolutionize space travel. There’s a trick to this. All right. So we’ve got our oxygen and I’ve got my hydrogen, got my rocket thruster right here. This combust these gases. You ready? All right. Hydrogen oxygen with exciter in three, two, one. Wow, that is real rocket thrust. This thing is amazing. It runs on hydrogen and oxygen that we can make from ice on the moon. This motor could go on a rocket today. And there’s a
huge advantage to having this fuel source on the moon rather than the earth. To get off the earth. A rocket has to have something like 80 or 90% of its takeoff. Weight is propellant. On the moon. You have one sixth of the gravity. That means it takes about one sixth of the energy than it would to leave the moon’s gravity to go somewhere else. It’s almost like the moon becomes a gas station that we can stop off at, fill up our fuel tanks and continue on to another planet. Water is too heavy to carry up
from Earth. But if the moon can act as a lunar gas station, the whole nature of space exploration changes. The problem is who owns this huge reserve of galactic fuel? Who does this water belong to and who gets to use it first. And now there is a race to get back to the moon. And the race is not just between the US and Russians. Now it’s China and India. Space X, whatever. Business wise, the moon is starting to look like a good investment. This is a prize worth fighting for. The gold rush is on. The
moon could become the gateway to the other worlds in our solar system, but some fear it may spark the first great space war.
