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US scientists have found evidence that water was held in the Moon’s interior, challenging some elements of the theory of how Earth’s satellite formed.

The Moon is thought to have been created in a violent collision between Earth and another planet-sized object.

Scientists thought the heat from this impact had vaporised all the water.

But a new study in Nature magazine shows water was delivered to the lunar surface from the interior in volcanic eruptions three billion years ago.

This suggests that water has been a part of the Moon since its early existence.

The discovery came from lunar volcanic glasses, pebble-like beads collected and returned to Earth by the US Apollo missions in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

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The team, from Brown University, the Carnegie Institution for Science, and Case Western Reserve University, used secondary ion mass spectrometry (SIMS) technology to detect extremely minute quantities of water in glasses and minerals.

“We developed a way to detect as little as five parts per million of water,” said Erik Hauri, from the Carnegie Institution in Washington DC.

Full Article: BBC News

Pretty interesting news on our newest planetary neighbor. What implications this may hold as to whether or not their may have been life on the moon remains to be unseen. The article even points out that the water may have drifted to the poles and may remain there as ice.

The ancient catastrophe that gave birth to the Moon may have produced additional satellites that lingered in Earth’s skies for tens of millions of years.

A new model suggests moonlets may have once occupied the two Earth-Moon Lagrangian points, regions in space where the gravitational tug of the Earth and the Moon exactly cancel each other out. Objects trapped in these points are called Trojans and can remain stationary forever if left undisturbed.

Scientists think the Moon was created when Earth was struck by a Mars-sized object some 4.5 billion years ago.

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Once captured, the Trojan satellites likely remained in their orbits for up to 100 million years, Lissauer and co-author John Chambers of the Carnegie Institution of Washington say. Then, gravitational tugs from the planets would have triggered changes in the Earth’s orbit, ultimately causing the moons to become unmoored and drift away or crash into the Moon or Earth.

Full Article: NewScientist

While I have heard the idea of a Mars sized planet crashing into the Earth to create the moon, I have never heard there may have been multiple moons for a period of time. I think it would be fascinating to have multiple moons to be able to visit instead of just one. While they may not have been very large, it would probably have been akin to visiting something like an asteroid.