Ice found on moon
This is a great find. Water on the moon makes a human presence much easier.
Astronomers have found patches of frost scattered around the moon’s north and south poles which could one day provide a source of water for human visitors.
The scientists spotted the telltale signature of frozen water in infrared measurements taken by Nasa’s moon mineralogy mapper, an instrument that flew on India’s Chandrayaan-1 mission to the moon a decade ago.
The freshly-analysed data show that water ice lurks on the ground in a number of spots near the moon’s polar regions that are permanently in shade and so sheltered from the heat of the sun’s rays.
Most of the ice was found near the moon’s south pole around a cluster of craters named after scientists and explorers, including Haworth, Shoemaker, Sverdrup and Shackleton. In the north, the patches of ice appeared to be more isolated, according to Shuai Li at the Hawaii Institute of Geophysics and Planetology in Honolulu.
Follow-up measurements of the ice patches found that they tended to form where the surface temperature never crept above -163C, but temperature alone was not enough to guarantee frozen water: only 3.5% of the shadowy areas the scientists checked for water revealed notable signs of ice.