Lunar water unlocks possibilities
NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine has a vision for renewed and ‘‘sustainable’’ human exploration of the moon, and he cites the existence of water on the lunar surface as a key to chances for success.
‘‘We know that there’s hundreds of billions of tons of water ice on the surface of the moon,’’ Bridenstine told Reuters last month, a day after Nasa unveiled its analysis of data collected from lunar orbit by a spacecraft from India.
The findings mark the first time scientists have confirmed by direct observation the presence of water on the moon’s surface — in hundreds of patches of ice lying in the darkest and coldest reaches of its polar regions.
The discovery holds tantalising implications for efforts to return humans to the moon for the first time in half a century. The presence of water offers a potentially valuable resource not only for drinking but for producing more rocket fuel and oxygen to breathe.
Bridenstine, a former US Navy fighter pilot and Oklahoma congressman tapped by
President Donald Trump in April as Nasa chief, spoke about ‘‘hundreds of billions of tons’’ of water ice that he said were now known to be available on the lunar surface.
But much remains to be learned. Nasa lunar scientist Sarah Noble told Reuters separately it was still not known how much ice was present on the moon and how easy it would be to extract useful quantities.
‘‘We have lots of models that give us different answers. We can’t know how much water there is,’’ she said, adding that it would ultimately take surface exploration by robotic landers or rovers, in more than one place, to find out.
Most of the newly confirmed frozen water is concentrated in the shadows of craters at both poles, where the temperature never rises higher than minus 157degC.
Although the moon was long believed to be entirely dry or nearly devoid of moisture, scientists have found increasing evidence in recent years that water exists there.
A Nasa rocket sent crashing into a permanently shadowed lunar crater near the moon’s south pole in 2009 kicked up a plume of material from beneath the surface that included water.
A study published the following year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences concluded that water was probably widespread within the moon’s rocky interior, in concentrations ranging from 64 parts per billion to five parts per million.
Bridenstine talked about making the next generation of lunar exploration a ‘‘sustainable enterprise’’, using rockets and other space vehicles that could be used again and again.
‘‘So we want tugs that go from Earth orbit to lunar orbit to be reusable. We want a space station around the moon to be there for a very long period of time, and we want landers that go back and forth between the space station around the moon and the surface of the moon,’’ he said.
Nasa’s previous programme of human moon exploration ended with the Apollo 17 mission in
1972.
Last December, Trump announced a goal of sending American astronauts back to the moon, with the ultimate goal of establishing ‘‘a foundation for an eventual mission to Mars’’.
The Trump Administration’s $US19.9 billion ($NZ29.7 billion) budget proposal for Nasa for the fiscal year beginning October 1 includes $US10.5 billion for human space exploration.
The budget supports development of Nasa’s new Space Launch System rocket and the Orion spacecraft designed to carry a crew into space. The administration envisioned a SLS/ Orion test flight around the moon without a crew in 2020, followed by a flyaround mission with a crew in 2023.
Nasa is also planning to build the Lunar Orbital PlatformGateway — a space station in moon orbit — in the 2020s. It said the power and propulsion unit, its initial component, was targeted to launch in 2022. — Reuters