Japanese Spacecraft Fails to Find Ice At Potential NASA Moon Base

Japan’s Kaguya spacecraft has been unable to detect any evidence of water ice in Shackleton crater, a favoured area for a lunar base on the south pole of the Moon.

It has been believed that water from comets and asteroids would have delivered a great deal of water to the Moon, most of it being stored in the poles, frozen inside craters that are hidden from sunlight. In the mid 1990s, there were contradictory findings regarding whether or not ice existed at the Lunar south pole. The US Clementine probe said that it did, but later observations by the Arecibo Radio telescope in Puerto Rico contradicted this.

Junichi Haruyama from Japan’s Institute of Space and Astronautical Science and his team analysed Kaguya’s observations of Shackleton crater, a 4.2 km crater which is permanently in shadow. Because faint sunlight was scattered near the rim of the crater’s wall, they were able to see the floor of the crater, but hey did not detect any ice.

Haruyama say that there still may be dirty ice – soil mixed with 1 or 2 per cent ice by weight – on the crater floor.

NASA plans to build a base on the Moon sometime in the 2020s, and Shackleton crater is a preferred site, because of its long periods of constant sunshine and relatively small changes in temperature, and because it is unexplored.

India’s Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft, which can detect underground water ice, and NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which is scheduled to launch next year, should provide more information on the existence of water on the Moon.

www.spacetravelarchive.com