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David Walker / Stuff
Water molecules were detected in Clavius crater, one of the largest craters visible from Earth, NASA said.
The icy, shady nooks and crannies of the moon may hold frozen water in more places and in larger quantities than previously suspected – good news for astronauts at future lunar bases who could harness these resources to drink and make rocket fuel. , the scientists reported.
While previous observations have indicated millions of tons of ice in the permanently shadowed craters at the moon’s poles, a couple of studies in the journal Nature astronomy take lunar surface water availability to a new level.
More than 40,000 square kilometers of lunar terrain have the ability to trap water in the form of ice, according to a team led by Paul Hayne of the University of Colorado. That’s 20 percent more area than previous estimates, he said.
These ice-rich areas are near the moon’s north and south poles. Temperatures are so low in these so-called cold traps (minus 163 degrees Celsius) that they could retain water for millions or even billions of years.
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“We believe this will help expand potential landing sites for future lunar missions in search of water, opening up real estate previously considered ‘off limits’ for being dry,” Hayne said in an email to The Associated Press.
Using data from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, the researchers identified cold traps as small as a few meters wide and as wide as 30 kilometers and more, and used computer models to arrive at a size of micrometers.
“Since the little ones are too small to see from orbit, despite being much more numerous, we still can’t identify the ice within them,” Hayne said. “Once we are on the surface, we will do that experiment.”
For a second study, scientists used NASA’s Sofia Airborne Infrared Observatory to conclusively identify water molecules in the sunlit parts of the moon, just outside the polar regions.
Most of these molecules are probably stored in the gaps between moondust and other particles or encased within glassy volcanic material.
Scientists believe that all this water on the moon comes from comets, asteroids, interplanetary dust, solar wind, or even lunar volcanic eruptions. They will have a better idea of the sources “if we can go down to the surface and analyze samples of the ice,” Hayne said.
Lead researcher Casey Honniball, a postdoctoral fellow at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, told a news conference that she wanted to make it clear that Sofia’s study had found no puddles on the moon. Rather, the identified hydrogen and oxygen molecules are so far apart that they are neither in liquid nor solid form, he noted.
NASA is under the direction of the White House to return astronauts to the moon by 2024. The space agency wants its new Artemis moon landing program to be sustainable, unlike the Apollo program of half a century ago.
