Scientists have detected magmatic water — water that
originates from deep within the Moon's interior — on the surface of the Moon.
These findings, published in the August 25 issue of Nature Geoscience,
represent the first such remote detection of this type of lunar water, and were
arrived at using data from NASA's Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3).
The discovery represents an exciting contribution to the
rapidly changing understanding of lunar water, said Rachel Klima, a planetary
geologist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in
Laurel, Md., and lead author of the paper, "Remote detection of magmatic
water in Bullialdus Crater on the Moon."