Astro Blog

Source:  NASA  Press Release 13-267                 Excerpt: Using data from NASA's Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3) instrument aboard the Indian Space Research Organization's Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft, scientists remotely detected ... water that originates from deep within the moon's interior, on the surface of the moon. ..."NASA missions like Lunar Prospector and the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite and instruments like M3 have gathered crucial data that fundamentally changed our understanding of whether water exists on the surface of the moon," said S. Pete Worden, center director at NASA's Ames Research Center.... http://www.nasa.gov/press/2013/august/nasa-funded-scientists-detect-water-on-moons-surface-that-hints-at-water-below/

Source:   NASA RELEASE 13-164 Excerpt: ...NASA's Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) mission has uncovered the origin of massive invisible regions that make the moon's gravity uneven, a phenomenon that affects the operations of lunar-orbiting spacecraft. Because of GRAIL's findings, spacecraft on missions to other celestial bodies can navigate with greater precision in the future GRAIL's twin spacecraft ... pinpointed the locations of large, dense regions called mass concentrations, or mascons, which are characterized by strong gravitational pull. ...The origin of lunar mascons has been a mystery in planetary science since their discovery in 1968 by a team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif. Researchers generally agree mascons resulted from ancient impacts billions of years ago. It was not clear until now how much of the unseen excess mass resulted from lava filling the crater or iron-rich mantle upwelling to the crust. ...