Preprint
Review

Is There Water Ice in the Lunar Polar Craters?

Altmetrics

Downloads

376

Views

242

Comments

0

A peer-reviewed article of this preprint also exists.

This version is not peer-reviewed

Submitted:

30 May 2020

Posted:

31 May 2020

You are already at the latest version

Alerts
Abstract
This literature review found that it is doubtful that there is water ice in the polar craters on the Moon. In the course of this review, the following findings were found: (1) The absorption strength of hydroxyl radicals and hydroxyl groups are all 2.9μm, so it is easy to confuse hydroxyl radicals and hydroxyl groups when interpreting M3 spectra data. I do not doubt the ability of LCROSS to detect OH from water, but only suspect that LCROSS is unable to distinguish between hydroxyl radicals from water ice and hydroxyl groups from Moon's methanol due to ignore their spectral identity; (2) The water brought by comets and asteroids and the one caused by solar wind has been exhausted by reacts with the widespread methanol on the Moon in the presence of Pt/α-MoC or Pt/C catalysts. These reacts form large amount of hydrogen, thus clarifying a question NASA raised that "Scientists have long speculated about the source of vast quantities of hydrogen that have been observed at the lunar poles"; (3) The vast quantities of hydrogen in lunar polar craters at extremely low temperatures might be in liquid or solid state now, easy to confuse with water ice. It seems that all our previous misconceptions about water ice in the lunar polar craters might be due to the neglect of the widespread chemical role of lunar methanol. It is necessary to conduct in-depth research in this field in the future.
Keywords: 
Subject: Physical Sciences  -   Astronomy and Astrophysics
Copyright: This open access article is published under a Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 license, which permit the free download, distribution, and reuse, provided that the author and preprint are cited in any reuse.
Prerpints.org logo

Preprints.org is a free preprint server supported by MDPI in Basel, Switzerland.

Subscribe

© 2024 MDPI (Basel, Switzerland) unless otherwise stated