A lander and an orbiter are on their way to the Moon to look for water at the lunar south pole (pictured).Credit: Alan Dyer/VW PICS/Universal Images Group via Getty
Two US spacecraft launched to the Moon today from Florida’s Cape Canaveral, on their way to hunt for water that scientists think exists at the lunar south pole. What the craft find could have big ramifications for NASA’s plans to send astronauts to this part of the Moon in the coming years.
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One of the missions is a commercial lander; it aims to touch down closer to the Moon’s south pole than any previous mission, carrying NASA instruments including an ice-hunting robot drill. The other spacecraft, NASA’s Lunar Trailblazer, is an orbiter with the goal of producing the highest-resolution maps of water on the Moon.
Lunar water could provide a resource for expanded lunar exploration, such as by supplying the raw ingredients for rocket fuel at Moon bases. Scientists have known since 2009 that such water exists, but they want to know much more about where it is and how much there is. The two new spacecraft “are going after really important pieces of that puzzle,” says Parvarthy Prem, a planetary scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, who is not affiliated with either mission.
The lander is expected to touch down on 6 March. It is the second attempt by Intuitive Machines, a company based in Houston, Texas, whose first lunar spacecraft tipped over on landing last year.
Lunar Trailblazer will take a leisurely trajectory and reach the Moon in several months. If all goes well, it will enter its final science-mapping orbit around August.
Searching for water
Many space agencies and scientists are keen to learn more about water at the lunar poles, which hold a geological record of the Solar System’s early history. The Indian mission Chandrayaan-2 is currently orbiting the Moon and building up its own data on where water might exist, as is a Korean probe that carries a NASA instrument to peer into shadowed, potentially ice-rich craters.
Intuitive Machines’ new lander, named Athena, is headed for the Mons Mouton region of the Moon. Researchers think there is water in the lunar soil there, perhaps bound up in minerals or in pores in the soil.
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Athena will search for water in several ways, including the use of NASA’s ice-mining drill, TRIDENT. If Athena lands successfully, operators will command TRIDENT to penetrate the lunar soil, drilling up to one metre deep to pull up the soil and leave it in a crumbly pile on the surface. A mass spectrometer on board will analyse the pile for signs of water or other volatile substances that might be escaping as gases. That ability to drill and analyse simultaneously provides “critical data on how lunar soils behave”, says Jackie Quinn, the drill’s project manager at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center on Merritt Island, Florida.
