GOLDEN, Colo. – A hot topic for lunar researchers is whether water ice is an easily accessible resource at the moon’s south pole, as experts have long believed. The search for exploitable water ice is a high priority on NASA’s Artemis agenda as the agency strives for a sustainable human presence on the moon.
Moon water ice is thought to reside in permanently shadowed regions, or PSRs, in supercold cold traps, where gases can freeze to their solid form. However, experts at the Space Resources Roundtable held June 4-7 on the campus of the Colorado School of Mines here drew attention to the scarcity of data supporting the prospect of using water ice on the moon. While there appears to be strong evidence that water is present, numerous questions remain that, if left unanswered, challenge the assumption that explorers will be able to make use of it.
Technical challenges
“Most ice is expected in old large craters that are permanently in shadow, but no missions will go there due to the technical challenges of landing in the dark and operating in extreme cold,” said Norbert Schörghofer, a senior scientist at Planetary Science. Institute located in Hawaii. Space News.
However, hopes that there might be an abundance of water ice on the moon’s surface were dashed by data from the Korea Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter of the Korea Aerospace Research Institute, also known as Danuri. It entered lunar orbit in December 2022 and will now continue its moon-observing mission until December 2025.
Danuri is carrying ShadowCam, a NASA-funded instrument built at Arizona State University, to collect high-resolution images of the moon’s PSRs from lunar orbit to determine the distribution and accessibility of water ice and other volatiles. According to Schörghofer, ShadowCam did not find the water that researchers had hoped to see.
“Although ShadowCam found no evidence of ice in the moon’s cold traps, there is still strong evidence of ice in the subsurface,” Schörghofer said. That ice may be present outside the cold traps at shallow depths, a finding that can be verified with a single borehole, he said.
Schörghofer added that several orbital missions found evidence of buried water on the moon, pointing to an instrument aboard NASA’s Lunar Prospector spacecraft that orbited the moon from January 1998 to August 1999, and an instrument supplied by Russia on the now orbiting NASA Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. Both lunar orbiters carried a neutron spectrometer instrument that detected hydrogen, probably in the form of water.
“Physical confirmation of water ice could provide a major boost to human and robotic exploration,” said Ben Bussey, chief scientist of Intuitive Machines.
Scan for water
While hinting at evidence from multiple sensors that there may be a lot of ice on the moon, Bussey said what is unknown is the location, amount and form of lunar water – and whether it is feasible to harvest it.
“Physical confirmation of water ice could provide a major boost to human and robotic exploration,” says Bussey.
“There is a possibility that even if there are abundant water reservoirs, they may be too difficult to reach,” Bussey said Space News, like water ice lurking in PSRs. It may be that the water is so dispersed that extracting the resource would require processing large amounts of lunar regolith, he said.
Bussey said the next crucial piece of the puzzle will come from an Intuitive Machines hopper, which will fly to the moon’s south pole under NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative, specifically targeting Shackleton Ridge, later in 2024 This area receives enough sunlight to power a lander for a mission of about ten days.
The lunar lander also carries the NASA-funded Polar Resources Ice-Mining Experiment-1 to assess the water content of regolith and search for other volatiles in the polar lunar landing zone.
That region provides a clear line of sight to Earth for constant communication and could serve as a potential destination for subsequent human exploration.
If the robot lander lands successfully, it will deploy a Micro Nova Hopper – a propulsion drone funded by NASA. This drone is designed to hop over the lunar surface, Bussey said, and will deliver a neutron spectrometer from Hungary’s Puli Space Technologies to the permanently shadowed floor of the Marston crater.
“This will provide the first direct surface measurement of hydrogen, an important indicator of the presence of water,” Bussey said.