If you need to ship astronauts to the moon, a spot with water could be a great vacation spot.
Obviously, people must drink water to outlive, and water molecules may be cut up into hydrogen and oxygen. Oxygen supplies air to breathe, and hydrogen and oxygen will also be used as rocket propellants to get again residence to Earth, or someplace else within the photo voltaic system.
But water is heavy, and lugging it from Earth is dear and inconvenient.
The rocks introduced again by NASA’s Apollo astronauts from 1969 by means of 1972 steered that the moon was fully dry. But then planetary scientists began seeing hints of water ice on the backside of craters within the polar areas the place the solar by no means shines. India’s first lunar orbiter, Chandrayaan-1, collected among the knowledge that confirmed the presence of water.
The armada of missions now headed to the south pole intention to measure how a lot water is contained within the shadowed craters and the way tough it will be to extract the water. (It could possibly be very tough if the water molecules are trapped inside minerals and never as ice blended in with the soil.)
Layers of ice within the craters may additionally present a historical past e-book of the photo voltaic system, very like how ice cores in Greenland and Antarctica present a file of Earth’s local weather.
Source: www.nytimes.com