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How water on Moon may be 'harvested' in future to propel missions to Mars | With an instrument aboard India's Chandryaan discovering water molecules on the Moon, scientists are now all the more confident of harvesting water from the lunar surface
in the future, which could help sustain lunar astronauts and even propel missions to Mars. Three spacecraft - India's Chandrayaan-1 and NASA's Cassini and Deep
Impact probes - have detected the absorption of infrared light at a wavelength
that indicates the presence of either water or hydroxyl, a molecule made up of
a hydrogen and an oxygen atom. All found the signature to be stronger at the poles
than at lower latitudes. Some of these molecules may be created continuously when
solar wind protons - hydrogen ions - bind to oxygen atoms in the lunar soil. Comet
impacts may also have brought water to the moon. Water delivered by comets or
generated by the solar wind could randomly diffuse over time into permanently
shadowed craters at the lunar poles, which were recently measured to be colder
than Pluto. "Once it gets in there, it's not going to come out," said Carle Pieters
of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, lead scientist for the NASA-built
instrument that made the Chandrayaan-1 measurements. So far, the water does not
appear to be very abundant - a baseball-field-sized swathe of lunar soil might
yield only "a nice glass of water," Pieters told New Scientist. But, if it could
be harvested, lunar astronauts could use it as drinking water and split it into
oxygen and hydrogen to make rocket fuel for their return journeys. That would
slash launch costs, since it would reduce the amount of fuel they would need to
lug with them from Earth. Rocket fuel produced on the moon might even help mount
a human mission to Mars. Because of the moon's weaker gravity, it would take less
energy to loft fuel into space for a Mars mission from the lunar surface than
it would from Earth. "It completely changes the spaceflight paradigm," said Paul
Spudis of the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, Texas. "It's like building
a transcontinental railroad to space," he added. As to how to extract water that
is likely locked up as small concentrations of ice in the lunar soil, Edwin Ethridge
of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center and William Kaukler of the University of
Alabama, said that microwaves could provide the key. |
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