MOON ICE BOOSTS SPACE COLONIZATION HOPES
Tuesday, 3 December 1996 6:00 PM
Source: Science Now
Moon Ice Boosts Space Colonization Hopes
WASHINGTON, D.C.--Planetary scientists announced at a press conference this
afternoon that they have found strong signs of ice secreted in a dark cranny near
the moon's south pole. If astronauts could mine such icy deposits, they would
have the essentials--air to breathe, water to drink, and fuel for their rockets--for
unar colonization and a steppingstone to Mars and other planets. Details of the
finding are published in a Report in the current issue of Science.
Scientists have long imagined ice hidden from the moon's searing daytime
temperatures in pockets of permanent shadow near the poles where the sun never
reaches. But it took the little Clementine spacecraft, a low-cost mission of the
Department of Defense and NASA, to shine a radar "flashlight" into the
permanent darkness of one corner of a great impact crater and get a return flash
of the sort that ice can make. Known ice lodes have produced similar flashes on Jupiter's moons, the south polar cap of Mars, and the Greenland ice sheet. "It's
not an ice rink on the moon," says lunar geologist Paul Spudis of the Lunar and
Planetary Institute in Houston, but "we think we've discovered ice. The
significance of this for future exploration of the solar system is very profound."
The potential significance may be profound, but the technology that yielded signs
of ice is not. While orbiting the moon, Clementine bounced its 6-watt
communications signal off the surface to be picked up by big antennas back on
Earth. On three passes--two over the north pole and one near the more heavily
shadowed south pole--nothing extraordinary happened. But on a pass that
included an area in permanent shadow near the south pole, the reflected signal
brightened just as expected if it had bounced around within subsurface ice to
produce a "road-sign reflector effect," says team member Stuart Nozette. The
reflected signal's polarization appeared as if it had reflected from radar-permeable
ice rather than rock.
The Clementine team envisions one or more patches of buried ice dirtied by lunar
soil or even soil laced with ice crystals, covering more than 100 square
kilometers. Presumably comets crashing into the moon over the eons left water
vapor that condensed in permanent shadow at 40 degrees above absolute zero
and never escaped.
Some planetary radar specialists, however, believe the ice may be a figment of
the imagination. The signal "does all the right things," says Gordon Pettengill of the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, "but it's only one pass. It's very
suggestive, but I wouldn't give it more than a 30% chance of being real."
Conveniently enough, NASA's Lunar Prospector spacecraft, due for launch next
October, will be carrying a neutron spectrometer that can sniff out ice in the
deepest of shadows.
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