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The moon is full of hidden water spots, NASA researchers have found.
That’s great news for the agency’s plans to send astronauts back to the moon, establish a permanent base there, and eventually use it as a stopping point on the way to Mars.
Those ambitions hinge on the ability to extract icy water on the moon and break it down into oxygen and hydrogen to make rocket fuel. Given that it is extremely expensive and difficult to launch enough fuel from Earth to get astronauts to Mars, water on the Moon is likely to play a critical role in ushering in a new era of human exploration of deep space.
“You start to do gas stations in space. This really starts to reduce your dependence on bringing all that fuel from Earth,” Angel Abbud-Madrid, director of the Space Resource Center at the Colorado School of Mines, told Business Insider. “That is really what prevents us from exploring deep space.”
The artistic concept of astronauts and human habitats on Mars.
JPL / NASA
Until now, NASA didn’t know how much water might be available on the moon or how easy it would be to extract it. But two articles published in the journal Nature Astronomy on Monday make the future of lunar ice mining that much brighter.
One of the studies confirmed the presence of molecular water in dust on the moon’s surface for the first time. The other identified tens of billions of small, cold regions in the shadows across the moon where the sun never shines and ice rests on the surface.
“Both, in different ways, would seem to indicate that there is more water available on the lunar surface than we have been thinking even recently,” Leslie Gertsch, a geological engineer at the Missouri University of Science and Technology who was not involved in the study, said. to Business Insider. “Whether or not it can be extracted is another question.”
A space plane detected lunar H2O for the first time
Experts had long thought that the moon would not be a safe place for water, as it has no atmosphere to protect its surface from solar radiation.
But scientists and their spacecraft have been detecting telltale signs of lunar water for the past three decades. First, they found hydrogen over the poles. Then traces of water appeared in lunar rock samples from the Apollo missions. Later, the Cassini spacecraft picked up water signals while looking at the moon on its way to Saturn.
Finally, in 2018, scientists confirmed that water ice was settled on the surface of the moon’s poles. These deposits are in shady regions called “cold traps” that sunlight cannot reach.
A map of “cold traps” within the dark lunar craters at the moon’s south pole (left) and north pole (right). The blue dots show places where there may be water ice on or near the surface.
POT
But there was always the possibility that none of those discoveries was actually water as we know it, H2O, but rather a compound called hydroxyl.
Researchers tend to describe both compounds as “water,” but the oxygen and hydrogen molecules that make up hydroxyl form a much stronger chemical bond than those of H2O.
“If we wanted to extract hydroxyl from a soil to use as a resource, it would take a lot more energy to break it down, to create other things like breathable oxygen or drinking water for astronauts,” Casey Honniball, postdoctoral fellow at the Goddard Space Flight Center at the NASA said at a press conference. “But with molecular water, if we have that on the moon and we can extract it, that makes it an easier process to bring it to other compounds that we would like to use.”
To find out if the moon harbors molecular or hydroxyl water, Honniball hopped on a space plane.
NASA’s Stratospheric Infrared Astronomy Observatory.
POT
The Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy is a converted Boeing 747 with a 2.7 meter telescope and the ability to fly into the stratosphere. That’s high enough to avoid atmospheric distortion from the moon’s infrared signals.
Honniball spent about nine hours on the plane, flying about 40,000 feet above Earth. She detected the wavelengths of H2O, and surprisingly they came from a part of the moon lit by the sun.
That means that the water molecules are likely embedded in glass beads that make up about 30% of the lunar soil. Those probably protect H2O from the vaporizing powers of the sun.
Honniball does not know if the glass of the whole moon contains water; it could be specific to the region you studied. But either way, the water molecules embedded in glass beads would not be easy to extract.
“There is a reason why high-level nuclear waste is planned to be put into glass,” Gertsch said. “Glass doesn’t let things come out easily.”
Little shadows could harbor water across the moon
Mountains on the moon as seen by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.
NASA / GSFC / Arizona State University
Until now, the most well-known lunar water reservoirs were those in the large, permanently shadowed regions at the poles, the coldest spots ever measured in our solar system.
But by examining thousands of photos from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, a group of researchers found smaller regions of permanent shadow covering the moon’s surface.
Paul Hayne, a planetary scientist at the University of Colorado Boulder who led the study, compared the discovery to “turning over a rock and finding all the billions of sneaking insects.” He estimated that there are tens of billions of these “micro cold traps” around the moon’s poles.
Hayne’s team did not search for water in these regions, but previous research had already confirmed the presence of water ice in the great shadows of the poles.
“If there is water in these larger cold traps, then there should be water in the smaller ones as well,” Hayne told Business Insider.
This means that, in theory, the mining machines could stay in the sunlight and avoid extreme freezing temperatures while extracting the ice from the micro traps.
“You could go to a place in these polar regions and stand in the sunlight and bend over, or use a tool to draw water from one of these much smaller shadows that is much more accessible,” Hayne said.
In total, Hayne’s team estimated that the cold-trap shaded regions covered about 0.15% of the moon’s surface.
The moon seen by NASA’s Mariner 10 in 1973.
NASA / JPL / Northwestern University
If these cold micro traps are filled with water, that would make it easier to remove the moon, since they extend far from the poles and it is easier to land a spacecraft near the moon’s equator.
But Gertsch said big questions remain about the lunar ice. While both discoveries are “tantalizing,” he said, we can’t really know the nature of the lunar soil until “we go there and play.”
NASA is sending a water fighter vehicle to the south pole of the moon
An illustration of NASA’s volatile polar research rover on the surface of the moon.
NASA Ames / Daniel Rutter
To investigate lunar water closely, NASA is preparing to launch a drill and mass-measuring instrument to the moon’s south pole in 2022. Once there, it will attempt to collect ice water.
Then, in 2023, NASA aims to launch the Viper (short for Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover) to hover over rocky terrain, drilling through sections of lunar ice and soil for analysis. During its 100-day lifespan, the rover will have the primary goal of collecting data for NASA to map the moon’s water resources.
An illustration of Astrobotic’s Griffin lunar lander deploying a ramp on the surface of the moon.
Astrobotic
Given their more accessible locations, Hayne’s micro cold traps could be ideal targets for these missions.
Meanwhile, the Honniball team has requested an additional 72 hours on Sofia’s plane for more lunar observations.
But if NASA really wants to establish a lunar mining operation, it will have a lot more work to do.
“It takes more than one rover,” Gertsch said. “You can’t just send a seeker on a donkey into the mountains and hope to build a mine out of it.”
