Using data gathered by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) mission, scientists believe they have solved a mystery from one of the solar system's coldest regions -- a permanently¹ shadowed crater² on the moon. They have explained how energetic particles penetrating³ lunar soil can create molecular⁴ hydrogen from water ice. The finding provides insight into how radiation can change the chemistry of water ice throughout the solar system. Space scientists from the University of New Hampshire and NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center have published their results online in the Journal of Geophysical Research (JGR): Planets. Lead author of the paper is research scientist Andrew Jordan of the University of New Hampshire's Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans, and Space (EOS).

 

Discovering molecular hydrogen on the moon was a surprise result from NASA's Lunar Crater Observation Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) mission, which crash-landed the LCROSS satellite's spent Centaur⁵ rocket at 5,600 miles per hour into the Cabeus crater in the permanently shadowed region of the moon. These regions have never been exposed to sunlight and have remained at temperatures near absolute zero for billions of years, thus preserving the pristine⁶（原始的） nature of the lunar soil, or regolith（风化层）.

 

Instruments on board LCROSS trained on the resulting immense debris⁷ plume⁸ detected water vapor⁹ and water ice, the mission's hoped-for quarry¹⁰, while LRO, already in orbit around the moon, saw molecular hydrogen -- a surprise.

 

"LRO's Lyman Alpha Mapping Project, or LAMP, detected the signature of molecular hydrogen, which was unexpected and unexplained," says Jordan.

 

Jordan's JGR paper, "The formation of molecular hydrogen from water ice in the lunar regolith by energetic charged particles," quantifies an explanation of how molecular hydrogen, which is composed of two hydrogen atoms and denoted（表示，指示） chemically as H2, may be created below the moon's surface.

 

"After the finding, there were a couple of ideas for how molecular hydrogen could be formed but none of them seemed to work for the conditions in the crater or with the rocket impact." Jordan says. "Our analysis shows that the galactic cosmic rays, which are charged particles energetic enough to penetrate¹¹ below the lunar surface, can dissociate the water, H2O, into H2 through various potential pathways."

 

That analysis was based on data gathered by the Cosmic Ray Telescope for the Effects of Radiation (CRaTER) instrument aboard the LRO spacecraft. Jordan is a member of the CRaTER scientific team, which is headed up by principal investigator¹² Nathan Schwadron of EOS. Schwadron, a co-author on the JGR paper, was the first to suggest energetic particles as the possible mechanism¹³ for creating molecular hydrogen.

点击收听单词发音