Washington DC: America’s National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) on Wednesday said that scientists have confirmed the presence of frozen water deposits in the darkest and coldest parts of the Moon’s polar regions, using data from the Chandrayaan-I spacecraft launched by India 10 years ago. The ice deposits are patchily distributed and could possibly be ancient, according to the study published in the journal PNAS.
With enough ice sitting at the surface- within the top few millimetres, water would possibly be accessible as a resource for future expeditions to explore and even stay on the Moon. Scientists have retorted that the ice on surface is potentially easier to access than the water detected beneath the Moon’s surface. At the southern pole, most of the ice is concentrated at lunar craters, while the northern pole’s ice is more widely, but sparsely spread.
It has been revealed that due to very small tilt of the Moon’s rotation axis, sunlight never reaches these isolated regions. Previous observations indirectly found possible signs of surface ice at the lunar south pole, but these could have been confused with other phenomena, such as the unusually reflective lunar soil. Finding out more about this ice on moon surface, how it got there it interaction with the larger lunar environment will be a key focus for NASA and commercial partners, as a part of human endeavour to explore and even inhabit the Moon.
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Ms Kalinga