An oasis on the moon?

stevejdufour_at_yahoo.com
Date: 02/26/05 

Date: 25 Feb 2005 21:58:00 -0800

Space Watch: An oasis on the moon?
By Robert Zimmerman
UNITED PRESS INTERNATIONAL
Published February 24, 2005

WASHINGTON -- As the human race begins the in-situ human exploration
of the solar system in the coming decades, one essential ingredient to
that journey will be water -- not only because it will suggest where
alien life might reside, but also because future explorers will need it
to survive and prosper.
    
    On Mars, the hunt for water has been intense and, in recent
months, extremely encouraging. The most recent discovery was announced
Wednesday when European scientists released images from the Mars
Express spacecraft -- which has been orbiting the red planet since Dec.
25, 2003 -- showing what appears to be a frozen sea buried under a
layer of volcanic ash near the Martian equator.
    
    The images show features almost identical to the large floes of
pack ice seen on Earth in places like the Arctic Ocean. The blocks look
like they had broken apart and had been floating in a sea when the
underlying water froze, thereby locking them into place. Subsequently,
everything was coated by a layer of volcanic ash perhaps only a few
inches thick.
    
    It was this ash layer, the scientists said, that prevented the
ice from sublimating away as the Martian atmosphere became dryer and
colder.
    
    What makes this discovery even more compelling is its location,
just north of the equator in the planet's lowlands, just offshore in
what some scientists have theorized was an ocean that once covered much
of the planet's northern hemisphere. If confirmed, the frozen sea would
represent strong proof that this large ocean once existed.
    
    Nor is this extraterrestrial watery evidence unique. The
results that have poured in from the twin Mars rovers, Spirit and
Opportunity, as well as from a host of orbiting American probes have
suggested repeatedly that vast and abundant amounts of liquid water
once existed on or under the Martian surface.
    
    Moreover, Mars is not the only place where spacecraft have
found evidence for liquid water. The Galileo probe -- which orbited the
Jovian system for eight years before plunging into Jupiter's cloudtops
in 2003 -- collected data indicating three of the planet's largest
moons -- Callisto, Ganymede and especially Europa -- appear to harbor a
deep subterranean ocean.
    
    Because these locations are very far from Earth, it will be
many decades before human spacefarers can take advantage of the water
stashed there. Mars and the moons of Jupiter must therefore take a back
seat to a much closer target -- our own moon, that skull-like dead
world that sits only 240,000 miles away and will be without question
the first place humans settle when the colonization of the planets
begins.
    
    At first glance, it seems absurd to look for water on the moon.
The place has no atmosphere, appears completely barren and is as dead
geologically as anyone can imagine. Or, as Apollo 8 astronaut Frank
Borman put it in 1968, "It's a vast, lonely, forbidding-type existence
or expanse of nothing."
    
    Yet two American probes -- Clementine in 1994 and Lunar
Prospector in 1998 -- found evidence that molecular hydrogen might be
locked in large quantities near the moon's poles. From this data,
scientists theorized water ice might exist frozen on the floors of a
handful of very deep polar craters which -- because of their extreme
high latitude -- remain always in shadow. All told, scientists have
estimated that as much as 6.6 trillion tons of ice could be available.
    
    The resolution of the data, however, was very coarse. For
example, using Lunar Prospector data, scientists only could estimate
the northern polar hydrogen region as an area from 3,600 square miles
to 18,000 square miles, with the southern polar area about half that
range. Future explorers must know the location more much precisely --
if not the exact crater itself -- in order for the spacefarers to
obtain their water supplies quickly and without undue risk.
    
    For this reason, both NASA and several other countries plan to
send a whole suite of robot scouts to the moon over the next few years.

    
    The first, dubbed SMART-1 and built by the European Space
Agency, already is in lunar orbit. On Feb. 10, ESA officials announced
they were extending SMART-1's lunar mission by one year, to August
2006.
    
    SMART-1 is ESA's first probe to the moon and its first to use
an ion engine for propulsion. As such, it took the spacecraft more than
a year to travel the relatively short distance from the Earth to its
satellite -- a journey that took the Apollo astronauts only three days.

    
    During each orbit, SMART-1 would fire its ion engine, giving it
a tiny push outward so its trajectory would spiral slowly away from
Earth. After a year of tiny pushes, the spacecraft's orbit finally
crossed into the moon's gravitational well last Nov. 15.
    
    Since then, SMART-1 has reversed this process, slowly spiraling
inward toward the moon, with an intended arrival by the end of February
at its planned polar reconnaissance orbit, ranging from 186 to 1864
miles above the lunar surface.
    
    Once there SMART-1 will begin surveying the moon's entire
surface, not only taking the highest resolution pictures ever, but also
using two different spectrometers -- one working in X-rays and the
other in the infrared range -- to assay the surface make-up, search for
evidence of hidden ice and, if possible, map potential landing sites
where that ice would be easily accessible.
    
    "SMART-1 is equipped with sensors to peek in the permanent
night at the bottom of polar craters," Bernard Foing, ESA's chief
scientist and SMART-1 project scientist, told Space.com last December.
    
    Later this decade, NASA plans to follow with the Lunar
Reconnaissance Orbiter. Intended to orbit the moon for a year, the
spacecraft will carry instruments designed to precisely locate hidden
hydrogen -- and therefore water ice -- and thus pinpoint future landing
sites.
    
    If confirmed to exist and then accurately mapped, lunar water
ice would become an oasis for future lunar explorers, allowing them not
only to carry less water, oxygen and fuel from Earth, but also to use
those commodities to supply outbound missions.
    
    One established at these secure outposts, astronauts will be
able to explore the rest of the lunar surface relatively easily. For
these new lunar explorers, all things finally will become possible.
    
    Since the Apollo landings, the majesty of the moon's most
mysterious places has been mostly forgotten, replaced with the false
impression that -- having sent a half dozen crews to the lunar surface
-- we have "been there, done that."
    
    The truth is, we haven't been there or done that. As I wrote in
"Leaving Earth," four of the six Apollo landing sites were chosen
because of how boring and therefore safe they looked. With all six
missions, the dozen Apollo astronauts explored less territory than a
New York City cab driver sees in a day's work.
    
    There are as-yet-unvisited places on the moon that are not only
scientifically intriguing, but also incredibly beautiful.
    
    Consider as just one example the crater Copernicus, one of the
largest and most distinct features on the lunar surface. Pictures taken
from orbit show that one could easily stand on the crater's 3,000
foot-high rim and look across its floor, past the cluster of 1,300 foot
central peaks, to the far rim some 60 miles away.
    
    Such a view not only would dwarf the Grand Canyon in scale, but
also -- with the moon's pitch-black sky and crystal-clear view -- far
exceed it in grandeur.
    
    Yet this is only one place. The far side of the moon, for
example, has been barely glimpsed by a handful of humans and its
detailed mapping has hardly begun.
    
    With SMART-1 in lunar orbit and other robots soon to follow,
the stage is set for the permanent return of humans to the moon in the
next decade.
    
    --
    
    Robert Zimmerman is an independent space historian and the
author of "Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8." His most recent book,
"Leaving Earth," was awarded the Eugene M. Emme Award by the American
Astronautical Society for the best popular space history in 2003.
E-mail sciencemail@upi.com

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