NASA will share an ‘exciting new discovery’ about the moon on Monday. Listen to the announcement live.

AS NASA / Bill Ingol
Jim Bridenstein, NASA Administrator, at NASA Headquarters in Washington, DC on November 29, 2018. NASA / Bill Ingles

• On Monday, NASA will share “an exciting new discovery” about the moon.
• The space agency has not released any details about the discovery, but said it could support “deep space exploration”.
• NASA TV will stream live audio audio of the ad. You can listen by embedding below.
• Visit Business Insider’s homepage for more stories.

NASA made a public announcement this week: it has “a new exciting discovery” about the moon, but it won’t announce the discovery yet.

Instead, it will share details at a press briefing on Monday and stream audio Dio Live online. (You can tune in by embedding below.)

The new discovery contributes to NASA’s efforts to learn about the moon in support of deep space exploration, the agency said in a statement. “Understanding the science of the moon also helps bring together a comprehensive history of the inner solar system.”

NASA’s Artemis program aims to send astronauts back to the lunar surface by 2024, later establishing a lunar base, from where it could hopscotch the first humans on Mars. It is not yet clear how the mysterious new discovery affects those plans.

AS AP by NASA
A picture made available by NASA in April 2020 shows Artemis astronauts on the moon. NASA by AP

Although we do know that this discovery was made by NASA’s Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, a Boeing 747 jet aircraft that uses a 9-foot telescope to capture infrared images of planets and other objects in our solar system. The plane flies about 41,000 feet above the earth.

Four NASA officials and scientists will discuss the findings on Monday at 12 noon:

• Paul Hertz, director of NASA’s astrophysics department
• Leading research scientist Jacob Blatter for the Directorate of Human Exploration and Operations Mission at NASA
• Carrie Honibile, Post Doctoral Fellow at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland
• Naseem Rangwala, project scientist for the Sophia Mission at NASA’s AIIMS Research Center in Mountain View, California.

The audio duo of the NASA TV ad will be streamed here:

NASA’s next mission to the moon is ready to search for water

Before it lands astronauts on the lunar surface, NASA plans to learn more about the moon’s natural resources – especially its reservoirs, which look mostly like ice near the moon’s poles.

Astronauts (or robots) can apparently mine that ice, melt it, store it, and use electricity to split water into liquid oxygen and hydrogen. Both elements are key in making rocket propellants.

Yet, NASA thinks most of that ice exists at the moon’s south pole. So, in 2022, he plans to send a drill and mass spectrometer there, so that some crop harvesting can be attempted.

Then in 2023, the agency aims to call the golf-cart-sized lunar robot the Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover or VIPR. During its 100-day lifespan, the rover will crawl over rocky terrain, drilling into lunar ice and parts of the ground to analyze their formation. The rover’s main goal is to collect data that NASA can use to map the moon’s water resources.

Astrobotic
A picture shows an astrob otic tick Griffin lunar lander arranging a ramp on the lunar surface. Astrobotic

If the moon really has plenty of water, it will help NASA realize its goal of establishing a permanent lunar base. From there, astronauts can mine and produce fuel that can be used to return home or to dive into space.

The resource on the moon will allow space explorers to “start living outside the ground,” NASA administrator Jim Bridenstein said in September.