![]() ![]() It could also be a resource for future human activities on the moon. Studying the ice’s chemical composition should reveal how it was delivered to the moon, in turn illuminating the origin of water on Earth, or indeed any rocky world around any star. This means ice on or below the lunar surface in PSRs won’t necessarily melt instead it might have survived there for billions of years. “Some PSRs are colder than the surface of Pluto,” said Parvathy Prem, a planetary scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland. Inside, temperatures can drop below minus 170 degrees Celsius. PSRs are of immense interest to scientists. ![]() “They’re in permanent darkness,” said Valentin Bickel, a planetary scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Germany. These are craters like Cabeus into which the sun can’t reach, because of the geometry of the moon’s orbit. Most of this ice resides in peculiar features at the moon’s poles called permanently shadowed regions (PSRs). Scientists now think there’s not just a bit of water ice on the moon there are 6 trillion kilograms of it. Yet about 25 years ago, spacecraft began to detect signatures of hydrogen around the moon’s poles, hinting that water might be trapped there as ice. Its lack of atmosphere and extreme temperatures should cause any water to almost instantly evaporate. “It’s really weird when you stop to think about it,” said Mark Robinson, a planetary scientist at Arizona State University. The moon isn’t an obvious reservoir of water. ![]()
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