Hopping probe may hunt for ice on the moon
| The entire future of human space exploration may rest on a patch of lunar ice. For the past two years NASA has focused on designing a new crew vehicle and launch system that could return astronauts to the moon by 2018. The agency's ultimate goal is to establish a permanent lunar base and use the program's technology to prepare a human mission to Mars. But the grand plan hinges on a risky prediction: that NASA will find water ice in a permanently shadowed crater basin at one of the moon's poles. Plentiful ice deposits would be a boon for lunar colonists, who could use the water for life support or convert it to hydrogen and oxygen rocket fuel. And two orbiters sent to the moon in the 1990s, Clementine and Lunar Prospector, found evidence of ice in perpetually shadowed polar areas where consistently frigid temperatures would preserve the water carried to the moon by comet and meteorite impacts. But some scientists have disputed Clementine's radar data, and the anomalous neutron emissions observed by Lunar Prospector could have been caused by atomic hydrogen in the lunar soil instead of ice. Read more... This was seized 4 u at Scientific American |
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