Chang'e-5, the lunar lander designed by China, has found water at its landing site using spectral reflectance measurements of soil and rocks.
The lunar unit landed near Oceanus Procellarum on the Moon's near side in 2020, where it collected and tested over 60oz (approximately 1.7kg) of lunar samples from a core about three feet deep. The findings were validated through the analysis of samples the lander returned to Earth in 2021. Now, the Chang'e-5 team has published the conclusions of the experiment in the journal Nature Communications.
Although it was India's Chandrayaan-1 mission that first detected the presence of water on the Moon from orbit, using NASA's Moon Mineralogy Mapper instrument, no mission has been able to confirm these findings on-site.
"For the first time in the world, the results of laboratory analysis of lunar return samples and spectral data from in-situ lunar surface surveys were used jointly to examine the presence...