New york, Oct. 22: The Moon, at least at the bottom of a deep, dark cold crater near its south pole, seems to be wetter than the Sahara, scientists reported on Friday.
In lunar terms, that is an oasis, surprisingly wet for a place that had long been thought by many planetary scientists to be utterly dry.
If astronauts were to visit this crater, they might be able to use eight wheelbarrows of soil to melt 10 to 13 gallons of water. The water, if purified, could be used for drinking, or broken apart into hydrogen and oxygen for rocket fuel — to get home or travel to Mars.
“That is a very valuable resource,” said Dr Anthony Colaprete, principal investigator of Nasa’s Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite — or Lcross, which made the observations. “This is wetter than some places on earth.” In the lunar crater, which lies in perpetual darkness, the water is in the form of almost pure ice grains mixed in with the rest of the soil, and is easy to extract. The ice is about 5.6 per cent of the mixture, and possibly as high as 8.5 per cent of it, he said. The $79 million LCross mission piggybacked on the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which was launched in June in 2009 and has been mapping out the lunar surface for a future return by astronauts.
LCross steered the empty second stage of the rocket, which otherwise would have just burned up in the earth’s atmosphere, onto a collision course with the Moon. LCross in October 2009 transmitted its gathered data to Earth and met a similar demise. In November 2009, the team reported that the impact had kicked up at least 26 gallons of water, confirming suspicions of ice in the craters. The new results increase the water estimate to about 40 gallons, and by estimating the amount of dirt excavated by the impact, calculated the concentration of water for the first time.