The suggestion that regions of the Moon have ancient ice triggered much hope that we could colonise it. Sadly, it’s looking ever less likely that it’s possible.
The US space agency Nasa sells dreams. There’s nothing wrong with that – after all, space and its exploration have always been a source of reverie, from Johannes Kepler’s youthful space-travel fantasy simply called The Dream to visions of the ‘final frontier’. The problem with dreams is that sooner or later you must wake up.
To judge from an article on lunar bases on Nasa’s web site, it’s reluctant to do that. “When multiple spacecraft all found unequivocal evidence for water on the moon it was a boon to possible future lunar bases, acting as a potential source of drinking water and fuel,” the article says. It explains that the atomic components of water – hydrogen and oxygen – on the lunar surface move towards the poles, “where [water] accumulates in the cold traps of the permanently shadowed regions.” Since it was first proposed several years ago, this idea that the polar craters, particularly the so-called Shackleton crater at the south pole, are lined with ancient ice has inspired many hyperbolic newspaper stories about colonising the Moon. But it’s looking ever less likely that it is true.
A new paper in the journal Geophysical Research Letters drives another nail into the coffin of lunar living. It suggests that what was at first taken to be bright, reflective ice in the Shackleton crater is in fact more likely to be white rock.
When the Apollo missions reached the Moon at the end of the 1960s, they brought back a sobering message: it seemed to be a dry, barren dustball. But the modern dream of “water on the Moon” began in earnest in 1994, when Nasa’s spacecraft Clementine orbited the Moon and studied the mineral composition of its surface. The reflections of radio waves beamed into the shadowed polar craters suggested that they might contain ice. But follow-up studies using radio telescopes on Earth failed to find any such evidence.
Then in 1998 another Nasa Moon mission, the Lunar Prospector spacecraft, used a special instrument to search for hydrogen atoms – a possible signature of water molecules – on the Moon’s surface. It detected the hydrogen signals from polar craters, but when at the end of its mission the spacecraft was purposely crashed into a south polar crater in the hope that it might send up a plume of water detectable from Earth, nothing of the sort was observed.
