Moonbase planners hoping they might get oxygen and fuel as well as water from ice near the lunar poles have seen the idea melt away over the past two weeks.
Using the giant Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico, Donald Campbell of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and colleagues have obtained the highest-resolution radar imagery ever of the shadowy craters near the moon’s south pole thought to harbour ice. They report in Nature this week (DOI: 10.1038/nature05167) that unusual radar signals formerly attributed to water ice are also reflected from sunlit areas where ice could not survive. “There could be ice in small grains,” Campbell told 91av, but thick deposits that could be a usable resource seem to be ruled out.
“Thick deposits of ice that could be a usable resource seem to be ruled out”
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The same conclusion was reported a few days earlier by David Paige of the University of California, Los Angeles, whose team calculated temperatures around the lunar south pole and found that most of the “cold traps” could not be filled with ice.
