Chandrayaan- 1

• Scientists have confirmed the presence of frozen water deposits in the darkest and coldest parts of the Moon’s polar regions using data from the Chandrayaan-I spacecraft.
• With this water would possibly be accessible as a resource for future expeditions to explore and even stay on the Moon, and potentially easier to access than the water detected beneath the Moon’s surface. The ice deposits are patchily distributed and could possibly be ancient.
• At the southern pole, most of the ice is concentrated at lunar craters, while the northern pole’s ice is more widely, but sparsely spread. NASA’s Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3) instrument to identify three specific signatures that definitively prove there is water ice at the surface of the Moon.

About Moon Mineralogy Mapper(M3):

• M3, aboard the Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft, launched in 2008 by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), was uniquely equipped to confirm the presence of solid ice on the Moon. It collected data that not only picked up the reflective properties we would expect from ice, but was able to directly measure the distinctive way its molecules absorb infrared light, so it can differentiate between liquid water or vapour and solid ice.

About Chandrayaan 1:

• The Chandrayaan-I spacecraft, India’s first lunar probe, started suffering from several technical issues and stopped sending radio signals on August 28, 2009. Shortly after this, ISRO officially declared the mission over.
• The probe, which was intended to operate for two years, achieved 95 per cent of its planned objectives in under a year of its space journey.

By: Vishal