India's Lunar Probe, Chandrayaan 1
2nd March 2010
We’ve studied the Moon with our telescopes, landed on it numerous times, mapped it, measured it, and dated it. But even now we are still finding out new things about our nearest neighbour in space, and we thought we knew pretty much everything we could about Lunar.
An Indian spacecraft called Chandrayaan 1 has now found quite a lot of water ice near the Moon’s north pole. Last year this spacecraft discovered water in the form of damp soil on the Lunar surface, and Nasa crashed it’s spacecraft from the LCROSS Mission into a dark crater, creating a plume of ice particles. Water is big news on the Moon, and this latest finding has come up with at least 600 million metric tonnes of the stuff, held in at least 40 dark craters out of reach of the Sun’s light.
The reason water is big news is that it can easily be used as a resource for a human presence on the Moon, and a fuel for spacecraft to venture further afield. The H2O can obviously easily be split into hydrogen and oxygen. The amount of water ice Chandrayaan 1 has found would be enough to launch one space shuttle per day for 2,200 years. All these discoveries are proving that a permanent human Lunar presence is at least possible.
Nasa had it’s Constellation Mission, a programme designed to put humans back on the Moon by 2020 using a crewship called Orion. But just when we are discovering more about the Moon and it’s possibilities, President Obama cancels the Nasa Constellation Programme budget. So it doesn’t look like we’ll be going there or further a field anytime soon.
Humans are explorers, it’s in our nature. In time we will visit the Moon again and go on to other planets, and we now know that the resources we need are there.
