The UAE's Nora al-Matrooshi is the first Arab woman to start training to be an astronaut, one of two Emiratis picked from thousands of applicants as the Gulf nation looks to the stars.

The 28-year-old mechanical engineer from Sharjah—one of the seven emirates that make up the UAE—has dreamt about space since she was a girl, learning about planets and stars at school.

And while there are no space missions scheduled, she hopes to have the opportunity to one day visit space, continuing the tradition of exploration begun by her sailor ancestors.

The heart of the Exospheric Mass Spectrometer (EMS) is visible in this image of the key sensor that will study the abundance of lunar water and water ice for upcoming missions to the Moon.

This spectrometer is being delivered to NASA today as part of the PITMS instrument for its launch to the Moon later this year.

EMS is based on an 'ion trap', an ingenious detector device that allows researchers to identify and quantify sample atoms and molecules in a gas and allows to establish a corresponding mass spectrum. Scientists at The Open University and RAL Space are developing EMS under an ESA contract.

Lunar molecules entering the sensor are bombarded by electrons emitted by a heated wire to create ions. The resulting ions are stored within an electric field formed by a set of precisely-shaped electrodes. The ions are then released from this 'trap' in order of increasing mass/charge ratio into the detector that identifies and quantifies their chemical makeup.

This will allow the instrument to measure water and other molecules in the very thin atmosphere of the Moon throughout the lunar day to study a lunar 'water cycle' concept.

A new study of lithium production in a classical nova found a production rate of only a couple of percent that seen in other examples. This shows that there is a large diversity within classical novae and implies that nova explosions alone cannot explain the amount of lithium seen in the current universe.