The study, led by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, was carried out jointly by experts from five US research institutes with the help of special equipment installed by NASA on India's Chandrayaan mission. Details of the study were published online yesterday in the research journal Science Advances.
Spectral analysis of these instruments revealed the presence of a special type of iron oxide, hematite, on the moon's poles, which could be simply called the "rust twin" because of its basic chemical formula. That's what rust is all about.
Keep in mind that this rust on the moon is actually in the form of a mineral called "hematite" which is abundant in the natural iron ore on earth.
Why is there rust on the moon without oxygen and water? Explaining a possible reason for this, experts say that the hydrogen reaching the moon (which is also an important component of water) may have reached there with the "solar winds" coming from the sun. Oxygen on the moon, on the other hand, is thought to be in the Earth's upper atmosphere, which was pushed to the moon by a terrestrial magnetic field.
This idea also seems plausible because the part of the moon that is always in the opposite direction to the earth does not have rust on it, while rust has been discovered only in the part that faces the earth.
