SHACKLETON CRATER
Take an imaginary trip to the site of the first lunar base – in both fact and fiction
One popular sci-fi TV series at the moment is For
All Mankind, which chronicles a fascinating and thrilling alternative history of the US space program. We all know that in real life Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were the first astronauts on the Moon, landing their Apollo 11 Lunar Module ‘Eagle’ in the Sea of Tranquillity. The rest, as they say, is history.
In the alternate history of For All Mankind, the Soviets beat the US to the Moon – Alexei Leonov takes that first small step instead of Armstrong, quickly followed by a female cosmonaut, and it all follows on from there as the Space Race goes into top gear. By the mid-1970s there have been 25 Apollo missions, carrying both male and female crews, and both superpowers have small military outposts on the Moon, built on the rim of a crater down at the Moon’s south pole called Shackleton. Why there? Because its shadowy depths, never illuminated by the Sun, contain priceless deposits of ice that can be processed to make fuel and water, allowing lunar settlers to ‘live off the land’ instead of lugging those resources up from Earth.
Shackleton is shown so realistically in the series that many fans of the show have apparently been asking astronomers if they could show them ‘the crater from the TV series’ with their telescopes. Unfortunately, that’s not possible, because being at the lunar south pole, Shackleton is only ever seen edge-on from Earth and is never illuminated by the Sun, which is exactly why it was chosen as the site of the superpowers’ bases in the TV series, and also why NASA is planning to establish a real, permanent base there by 2028 after the initial crewed Artemis missions have surveyed the area.
Real life will mirror fiction in this way – just like in the TV series, orbital surveys of Shackleton have detected traces of water within the crater, perhaps ice deposited there by comets. But unlike the glittering veins and chunks of pure ice shown being hacked out of the crater walls by For All Mankind’s axewielding astronauts, in real life the water found in the crater is all mixed in with the rocks and dust, so it will require a lot of processing to access. That’s just chemistry and engineering though, two things NASA is great at.
Appropriately named after the famous south polar explorer Ernest Shackleton, the crater itself is quite small. In fact, if it were anywhere else on the Moon it would be quite unremarkable. Only 12 kilometres (7.4 miles) across and just over four kilometres (2.4 miles) deep, it’s only interesting because of a useful combination of the water deposits detected within it and the height of several of the tallest peaks along its rim. Nicknamed the ‘Peaks of Eternal Sunlight’, these lofty summits are bathed in almost permanent sunlight, which means a base built on Shackleton’s rim could be powered by solar panels on the peaks, with its explorers and scientists sustained by water mined from within the crater.
It’s a little unfortunate that we can’t see
Shackleton properly from Earth, because in the years to come it’s going to become a very important and busy place, a lunar beachhead in the human exploration of the Solar System from where we will strike out to the asteroids and Mars.
As NASA gears up towards its return to the Moon in 2024, Shackleton will become the target for many robotic missions, perhaps including rovers, so even though you won’t be able to see it directly through your binoculars or telescope, it’s good to know where Shackleton is. On a clear night when the Moon is high and bright in the sky, you should cast your eyes down towards the south pole of the Moon and imagine what future astronauts will see and do there, more than half a century after their fictional counterparts explored it on TV.
If you’re one of our many younger readers you might bounce around the rim of Shackleton crater yourself one day, or gaze down into its depths from one of the Peaks of Eternal Light, looking down to where your colleagues are mining water – not just for you, but for all humankind.