The New York Times reports on the latest results from the $79 million Lcross mission. Last October, as it neared impact, the Lcross spacecraft released the empty second stage and slowed down slightly so that it could watch the stage’s 5,600-mile-per-hour crash into a 60-mile-wide, 2-mile-deep crater named Cabeus.
Debris ejected from the Cabeus lunar crater about 20 seconds after the Lcross impact: image Science / AAAS
A series of articles reporting the Lcross results appear in Friday’s issue of the journal Science.
Last November, 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 by amount of dirt excavated by the impact, calculated the concentration of water for the first time. The Sahara sands are 2 to 5 percent water, and the water is tightly bound to the minerals. 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 percent of the mixture, and possibly as high as 8.5 percent of it, Dr. Colaprete principal investigator of NASA’s Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite — Lcross – said.
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.
Also surprising was the cornucopia of other elements and molecules that Lcross scooped out of the Cabeus crater, near the Moon’s south pole. Lying in perpetual darkness, the bottom of Cabeus, at minus 370 degrees Fahrenheit, is among the coldest places in the solar system and acts as a “cold trap,” collecting a history of impacts and debris over perhaps a couple of billion years.
“This is quite a reservoir of our cosmic climate,” said Peter H. Schultz, a professor of geological sciences at Brown University and lead author of one of the Science papers. “It reflects things that hit the Moon.”
By analyzing the spectrum of infrared light reflected off the debris plume, Dr. Schultz and his colleagues identified elements like sodium and silver.
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