Qianjiang Evening News·Houri-Time News Reporter Guo Wen
High content of water was found in the lunar soil. As soon as the scientific research results of
were announced, everyone was in an uproar. Many netizens enthusiastically discussed the topic that Chinese people talked about most: Can they drink it? Can you grow vegetables?
's answer is naturally "no". The research team of the Institute of Geochemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, , which announced this result, explained: This is not the water in our daily concepts. The high content of water in lunar soil we found is found in the mineral crystal structure, so it cannot be used directly to drink or to grow vegetables. However, in the future, these water can be extracted through the development and utilization of lunar soil, which can be used as a life guarantee requirement for scientific research space stations in the future. This means that the lunar surface mineral is like a warehouse, which contains high content of hydroxy (-OH), which is the standard for judging the existence of water. Once the technology has developed to a certain stage, we can synthesize water through hydroxyl groups, just like taking out the raw materials of water from the warehouse.
Therefore, although the current high content of water in lunar soil cannot be directly drunk or used for growing vegetables, it is of great significance to the future exploration of the moon and other planets in the solar system. How to understand this achievement
?
The moon is not as drought as we think
About the moon, it accounts for a large proportion of the study of primary school science. The second, third and fifth grade "Science" textbooks have content to observe the moon phases, and require mastering the rules of phase changes, the relationship between the sun, the moon and the earth. It can be seen from this that as the satellite of the earth, the moon is very important in both subject study and life, and has a great impact on us.
In an era of booming development in my country's aerospace industry, the pure scientific research achievement of "high content of water is found in lunar soil" can gain such high attention, which shows that everyone's attention to China's cutting-edge science is a very good thing.
Although lunar soil cannot grow vegetables and the water inside cannot be drunk, this discovery is of great significance to the future aerospace industry.
First of all, it breaks the previous cognition of ordinary people.
We usually think that there is no water on the moon's surface, because the daytime temperature on the moon surface exceeds 120℃ and the atmospheric pressure is 0. Even if a basin of water is poured on the moon, it will quickly evaporate into water vapor. The water molecules will be decomposed by strong sun rays into hydrogen atoms and and oxygen atoms, and then blown into space by the solar wind, and the last drop will not be left.
But in fact, since 1969, the United States has landed the moon six times through the Apollo moon landing program and retrieved more than 380 kilograms of rock and soil specimens. Scientists from various countries have successively found trace amounts of water from these samples.
In 2008, India's "Moon Ship One" probe was launched, and NASA installed a "lunar mineralogy mapper" and a lunar impactor on this probe to detect the properties of the lunar surface minerals by analyzing the lunar reflection spectrum. At that time, scientists discovered hydroxyl groups (-OH) in many places on the moon, especially in impact craters at the north and south poles, and the signal of water was particularly strong.
However, the causes and distribution of lunar surface water have always been controversial due to the lack of direct sample analysis evidence.
Until this time, the Chinese scientific research team found from lunar samples that there was a high content of solar wind water in the mineral surface, at least 170ppm. ppm is a unit of metrology, 1ppm means "one part a million", and 170ppm means 170 grams of water in 1 ton (1 million grams) of lunar soil.
This is the first time scientists have obtained direct evidence of water content on the moon's surface, and the water content is much higher than expected.
In the sense of "discovering water", this research result is a great breakthrough.
Why do different lunar soil tests have different results
Speaking of this, students may ask, the United States has taken so many lunar samples from the moon and studied them for so many years, why haven’t they discovered the existence of water?
This has a lot to do with the sampling place.
Before, the United States obtained lunar soil mainly in the rich sea and quiet sea on the moon. Later, the United States and the Soviet Union exchanged lunar soil. The research results of both sides were similar in composition, which also shows that the sampling locations of these two countries were relatively close.
This time, China took samples in the Rumke Mountains in the north of the moon's largest html May sea " Storm Ocean ", which is quite far from the sampling locations in the United States, an area that humans have never explored. Scientists infer that the soil here is younger, and the content of radioactive elements such as uranium, thorium, potassium and other in the soil is higher, which is more research value and significance. Compared with the lunar soil collected by the United States, it is at least 1.5 billion years younger.
Therefore, the content of more than 40 elements was accurately measured in the lunar soil obtained by China this time, which is very different from the results measured in the 1 gram of lunar soil sample given to China by the United States.
I can do a lot in the future
Water is considered to be directly related to the formation of life. Only with water can there be a foundation for the production of life.
discovers water, which opens up infinite possibilities for the future of the moon, which means that we can do a lot next.
For example, the moon may become a transit station for space station or even human interstellar travel in the future. Because with the development of science and technology, we can extract water (hydroxyl groups) from lunar soil minerals as a supplement to the essential water resources for space navigation.
Moreover, scientists have found that due to long-term exposure to solar wind, the lunar soil contains a large amount of helium-3, which is a clean nuclear energy . Helium-3 has very little content on the earth. If the nuclear reaction problem is solved in the future, it is possible to solve the problem of launching rockets on the moon. Because the moon is very small and its gravity is only one-sixth of that of the earth, it does not require such a large launch vehicle, . Therefore, it will be very convenient to regard the moon as a transit station or launch site for humans to conduct interstellar exploration, and humans' exploration of the solar system will also make rapid progress.
Obtaining lunar soil means we can better understand the moon. The question of whether you are most interested in whether you can grow vegetables is actually the first step. This year, American scientists planted Arabidopsis on 12 grams of lunar soil. This means that the possibility of growing vegetables and food on the moon in the future exists.
This will be an indispensable step in the modern manned moon landing program, and it can help us build a lunar scientific research base more targeted. Not long ago, Chinese scientists discovered that there are active compounds rich in iron and titanium in lunar soil, which can act as catalysts to convert the in-situ resource water and carbon dioxide on the moon into oxygen , hydrogen and methane , etc.
Look, this is the meaning of studying lunar soil. In a small gram of soil, you can see the vast universe of the future.
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