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Water on the moon: That’s one small drop for mankind. . .
Nasa’s discovery that moon water may be more plentiful brings the hope of lunar bases
Jacqui Goddard, Miami
Tuesday October 27 2020, 12.01am, The Times
From the Sea of Tranquillity to the Ocean of Storms, the dusty lunar environment has never seemed the easiest of places for future explorers to get a drink, despite the names of its best-known landmarks.
Now, 11 years after scientists first saw evidence of water at the lunar surface, two studies raised the possibility yesterday that it may be more widespread, and more plentiful, than thought. Indeed, they say they have found proof that it exists beyond the permanently shadowed polar regions.
“We had indications that H2O, the familiar water we know, might be present on the sunlit side of the moon,” announced Paul Hertz, director of the astrophysics division in Nasa’s science mission directorate, following new flights of discovery by the space agency’s airborne Sofia observatory.
“Now we know it is there, this discovery challenges our understanding of the lunar surface and raises intriguing questions about resources relevant for deep space exploration.”
The findings are pertinent to Nasa’s Artemis programme, which will establish a sustainable human presence on the moon by the end of the decade, starting with landing the first woman and the next man on the lunar surface in 2024 to prepare for the next giant leap — onward missions to Mars.
Russia and China have also declared plans for establishing lunar bases.
Water represents not only life support for astronauts, but also for growing crops and for manufacturing rocket fuel. Extracting it from the moon, and other sources such as asteroids, can ease significantly the costs and logistical challenges of transporting it from Earth. “This discovery reveals that water might be distributed across the lunar surface and not limited to the shadows of the lunar poles,” Jacob Bleacher, chief exploration scientist for Nasa’s human exploration and operations mission directorate, said.
In a separate study using data from Nasa’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, researchers found that ice-rich areas near the moon’s north and south poles may contain about 20 per cent more water than suspected.
“We believe this will help expand the possible landing sites for future lunar missions seeking water, opening up real estate previously considered off limits for being bone dry,” Paul Hayne, an astrophysicist and planetary scientist at the University of Colorado, said.
Sofia — the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy — is a modified Boeing 747 aircraft that flies above 99 per cent of the Earth’s water vapour to get a clear view of the universe with its 9ft infrared telescope.
The Sahara has 100 times as much water as the moon. Casey Honniball, a postdoctoral fellow at Nasa’s Goddard Space Flight Centre in Maryland, who led the Sofia study, said: “To be clear, these are not puddles of water.” The discovery raises questions about how water is created and how it persists on the harsh, airless lunar surface, said Nasa. Studies will be needed to shed further light on the presence of water. “This will bring us a significant step closer towards Nasa’s goal of a sustainable, long-term presence on the moon, making it possible to eventually explore Mars and beyond,” Nasa said.
There are, researchers will insist, lots of good scientific reasons to be extremely excited about water on the moon. Yet their bosses at Nasa will still find their minds drifting to a different reason to be excited: the economic one (Tom Whipple writes).
For every extra kilogram you want to transport to the moon, it is estimated it will cost anything between $10,000 and $100,000 to get it there — whether it is a sophisticated sensor or a bottle of Evian. If we want to make lunar bases viable, ideally we would like not to have to take our water with us.
This is the promise offered by the signals reported yesterday. The existence of water is not that much of a surprise. But the findings show it may be more abundant and more widely spread than we had suspected. Around even shallow craters at the moon’s poles, where the sun has not touched the lunar soil for a billion years, may lie stores of ice for the taking.
Water is not only useful to astronauts, who will need it to live in any colony, but also to those who want to go further. A key reason that Nasa is looking to colonise the moon is to use it as a refuelling depot and launchpad. With only a sixth of the gravity of the Earth, the moon can be a staging post for rockets to Mars and beyond — provided, that is, it has its own rocket fuel.
That is what these finds offer. Water is hydrogen and oxygen. Use solar power to split it into its component parts, and you can make rocket fuel.
Exploring the solar system just became a significantly more practical proposition.
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