A frigid crater at the moon's south pole is jam-packed with water ice, with some spots wetter than Earth's Sahara desert, boosting hopes for future lunar bases.
That's the picture painted by six new studies that analyzed the intentional moon crash of a NASA spacecraft on Oct. 9, 2009. The agency's LCROSS probe was looking for signs of water when it smashed into Cabeus crater at the moon's south pole last year, and the spacecraft found plenty of it, as scientists announced last year.
Water ice makes up about 5.6 percent of the total mass on the floor of Cabeus — making the crater about twice as wet as Sahara Desert soil, according to LCROSS mission principal investigator Tony Colaprete.
The high concentration of water ice came as a bit of a shock to mission scientists. This moon water ice is also relatively pure, the researchers found. The original source of much of the material is likely asteroid or comet impacts, scientists said. Once they arrived, the compounds could have moved all over the lunar surface — liberated from the dirt by micrometeorite strikes or solar heating — until they hit a cold trap like Cabeus. The high concentration of water ice at the bottom of Cabeus is good news for anyone pushing for bases at the moon's poles.
Future moon-dwellers could conceivably mine such large quantities of ice efficiently. They could it process it into its constituent hydrogen and oxygen, prime ingredients of rocket fuel. And they could melt the ice down and drink it — provided they remove some of the nasty stuff, like mercury. Space.com
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