MOON RIVER!
Nasa f inds enough frozen water to support a colony – so could humans be living there by the end of the decade?
THERE is far more frozen water on the moon than previously thought – and enough to sustain a lunar base – Nasa said yesterday.
The search for ice on the moon has previously focused on its large polar craters. But scientists now believe there are billions of further craters and nooks filled with frozen water, some smaller than a 5c coin.
Together they add up to around 40,000 square kilometres, roughly equivalent to half the size of Ireland.
The discovery could make a lunar colony a reality in the future, with the ice deposits providing drinking water, the possibility of gardening, and even hydrogen rocket fuel.
A separate study, also released yesterday, found the first clear signs that water – rather than just a hydrogen compound – is on the warmer, sunlit surface of the moon.
But experts caution that the water may be hard to mine because it appears to be trapped in lunar soil and glass beads created from the enormous heat of meteorites which smashed into the moon and left its craters. Nonetheless, with plans in place to put the first woman and next man on the moon by 2024, the news that frozen water is waiting for them has been met with delight.
It could allow astronauts to spend months there in the future, an aspiration Nasa’s Artemis programme hopes to realise within the next decade.
Professor Alan Duffy, who was raised in Co. Antrim and is now lead scientist of the Royal Institution of Australia, said: ‘Water on the moon is more than just an exciting scientific discovery, i t makes possible the future expansion of humanity into a multi-planet species.’
Libby Jackson of the UK Space Agency said: ‘The discovery that the moon harbours water reshaped what we know of our closest celestial neighbour, and today’s announcement could take our understanding to a new level.
‘Using a small amount of the moon’s natural resources could make i t easier f or astronauts to explore the moon, and the hope is that these pockets could be used to create drinking water and rocket fuel.’
Billions of additional potential water pockets are now estimated to be on the moon, s pread f ar more widely t han previously thought.
Researchers worked this out by taking data from Nasa’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter to look for ‘cold traps’ – dark regions shielded from the sun’s rays for potentially billions of years which could contain frozen water molecules. They used mathematical tools to recreate what the moon’s surface might look like at a very small scale, and found it looked like a pitted golf ball. Paul Hayne, an author of a study on the findings published in the journal Nature Astronomy, said: ‘If you can i magine standing on the surface of the moon near one of its poles, you would see shadows all over the place. Many of those tiny shadows could be full of ice.’
But to be sure that the craters contain ice, space scientists may need to send a rover to the moon to dig for it. It has previously been suggested that there is water around the moon’s south pole. But now a study led by the University of Hawaii may confirm it, picking up water’s unique light signature in a crater located on the moon’s southern hemisphere.
The researchers found water in concentrations of 100 to 412 parts per million – roughly equivalent to about 350ml – trapped in a cubic metre of soil spread across the lunar surface.
Taken together, the new results are exciting for Nasa’s Artemis programme, which aims to have people setting foot on the moon again by 2024, and to establish a sustainable human presence there by the end of the decade.
Professor David Rothery, from the Open University, said: ‘These findings suggest when we start setting up permanently staffed lunar bases, people will be able to access water more easily at many places on the moon. Lifting mass off the Earth is very expensive, so the less water you have to take with you the better.’