Hopes,
dreams and practical plans to colonize or otherwise exploit the moon as a
source of minerals or a launch pad to the cosmos got a boost today with
NASA's announcement of significant water ice at the lunar south pole.
The LCROSS
probe discovered the equivalent of a dozen 2-gallon buckets of water in the
form of ice, in a crater at the lunar south pole. Scientists figure there's
more where that came from.
"The
presence of significant quantities of ice on the lunar surface catapults the
moon from an interesting waypoint to a critical launching pad for humanity's
exploration of the cosmos," said Peter Diamandis, CEO and chairman of the
X Prize Foundation, which is running a $30 million contest for private moon
rovers. "We're entering a new era of lunar exploration – 'Moon 2.0,' in
which an international group of companies and governments will use the ice and
other unique resources of the moon to help us expand the sphere of human
influence, and to help us monitor and protect the Earth."
The water
discovery firms up previous detections of the signature
of water molecules by three independent spacecraft. But the new finding
makes more of a splash in that the detections come from both infrared and
ultraviolet measurements, and a lot more of it was detected than scientists had expected.
"It is
a big 'wow,'" said Jack Burns of the Center for Astrophysics and Space
Astronomy at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and director of the Lunar
University Network for Astrophysics Research.
Set up
lunar camp
Having that
store of water on the moon could be a boon to possible future lunar camps. In
addition to a source of drinking water, lunar
water ice could be broken into its constituent hydrogen and oxygen atoms,
ultimately to be used in rocket fuel. That would mean spacecraft ferrying
future colonists to the moon would not have to take fuel for the return trip,
or the fuel could be used to launch trips beyond the moon. And water could be
used as a shield from cosmic radiation.
"We
now can say ... that the possibility of living off the land has just gone up a
notch," said Peter Schultz, professor of geological sciences at Brown University and a co-investigator on the LCROSS mission, referring to past detections
of water on the moon.
The new
discovery comes just as the Obama administration is deciding whether to
continue on with NASA's goal of putting astronauts back on the moon by 2020.
Today's news could tip the scales toward another lunar leap.
"It's
going to boost the interest in the moon, no doubt about it," said with
Michael Wargo, chief lunar scientist for Exploration Systems at NASA
Headquarters. "It's going to provide additional information that will
inform the decision that will inform the future of human space
exploration." He added that the new finding will likely be taken into
account when that administrative decision is made.
"In
terms of the clearly most practical destination for the next two to three
decades for human exploration it has to be the moon," Burns told
SPACE.com.
Big
challenges ahead
In the
midst of floating on "Cloud 9," as Burns described his reaction to
the water discovery, are the logistics of actually setting up a lunar colony.
"The
devil is in the details," Wargo said, adding, "None of our spacesuits
that we currently have would be appropriate for that extreme an
environment."
Any
materials built for Earth-like temperatures won't work on the moon. "They
don't bend anymore, they fracture, and they fracture brittle-y, and so everything
gets extremely brittle at those temperatures," Wargo said.
NASA
scientists have been quietly working in their tool shops on innovative ways of mining
and using the goods.
The water
could also be pumped into the roof of a lunar habitat to shield astronauts from
cosmic radiation. "So think of it as a layer of insulation like you would
have in the roof of your house," Burns said. "Instead of thermal
insulation this is insulation from radiation from the sun."
New page
in lunar history
When Apollo
astronauts visited the moon 40 years ago, the picture was of a bone-dry rock.
That picture has only changed within the last couple of decades as scientists
began to suspect that the moon's polar regions could hold stores of water ice
in so-called cold traps that are permanently in the darkness and can reach just
tens of degrees above absolute zero, Burns said.
The LCROSS probe
impacted one such cold trap, a crater called Cabeus, on Oct. 9. The $79 million
spacecraft, preceded by its Centaur rocket stage, hit the lunar surface in an
effort to create a debris plume that could be analyzed by scientists for signs
of water ice.
This watery
find may just be the first big one with more to come. "This was a random
shot in an area of permanent darkness and there may be many more places that
could have more of this stuff," Schultz told SPACE.com. "This is like
opening Pandora's Box."
"It's
been unfortunate that some have said, 'Moon, been there done that,'" Burns
said. "We only went to the moon six times and we didn't go to the most
interesting places on the moon. There's so much more to discover about the moon
just from a scientific perspective, what it can tell us about the formation of
the Earth."
Senior
writer Andrea Thompson contributed to this report.
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