Every such discovery reaffirms that the moon is a time machine.
Next to (or inside) the ice from the Permanently Shadowed Regions, there may be clues to how life got started on Earth. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-94-007-6546-7_... It's estimated that this trapped ice may be from the Earth and the Moon from 3.6B to 4.2B+ years ago. Along with other volatiles, this may give humanity an unprecedented look at what the Earth and the Moon were like before life arose. And if we're truly lucky, depending on how old life is, it may even help us understand how our planet changed while life arose and after life arose.
If it's not there, then the glass beads that they found the water in could also contain trapped gases and compounds that we've become better at detecting. Gases were found in one of the beads brought back by Apollo 15, https://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu//full/1991LPI....22..409...
It will likely take decades to figure out most of the information those samples will contain. Helium 3 wasn't discovered in the Apollo 11 and Apollo 17 samples until the 1980s. The Apollo samples are still yielding new science all these decades later.
I'm so excited about what the future has in store for us.
I’ve always wondered if this ice could have been the remnants of a comet, which after centuries of slowly spiralling closer and closer, landed gently on the moon in a soft cloud of dust.
There's no fluid bodies on the moon to cushion an incoming asteroid or comet - even if there was an initial gentle capture by the moons gravity, the object would either orbit indefinitely, be cast off, or meet a violent end, scattering atomized material across the surface in a wide debris field. This is why theres so much lunar dust coating the entire surface of the moon, and why that surface is so tremendously scarred. The ice is likely the result of countless violent collisions like this, and the ice crystals that manage to land in shaded craters accumulate while those exposed to the sun quickly sublime away.
Next to (or inside) the ice from the Permanently Shadowed Regions, there may be clues to how life got started on Earth. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-94-007-6546-7_... It's estimated that this trapped ice may be from the Earth and the Moon from 3.6B to 4.2B+ years ago. Along with other volatiles, this may give humanity an unprecedented look at what the Earth and the Moon were like before life arose. And if we're truly lucky, depending on how old life is, it may even help us understand how our planet changed while life arose and after life arose.
If it's not there, then the glass beads that they found the water in could also contain trapped gases and compounds that we've become better at detecting. Gases were found in one of the beads brought back by Apollo 15, https://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu//full/1991LPI....22..409...
It will likely take decades to figure out most of the information those samples will contain. Helium 3 wasn't discovered in the Apollo 11 and Apollo 17 samples until the 1980s. The Apollo samples are still yielding new science all these decades later.
I'm so excited about what the future has in store for us.
If you'd like to learn more, this is a fairly approachable article written by NASA's former Chief Scientist, Dr. Jim Green, https://room.eu.com/article/evolution-of-volatiles-on-the-mo...
The Moon as a Recorder of Organic Evolution in the Early Solar System: A Lunar Regolith Analog Study — https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/full/10.1089/ast.2014.1217
Potential for prebiotic chemistry at the poles of the Moon — https://spie.org/Publications/Proceedings/Paper/10.1117/12.4...