NASA Aims for Sustainable Moon Presence With Search for Lunar Water

The Artemis program plans to attain a sustainable presence on the moon by being able to mine its water ice reserves; this will be able to sustain human outposts by providing drinking water as well as oxygen and maybe even rocket fuel.

Water ice was already detected in shadowy crater depths, although it remains to be seen if the areas are, in fact, rich in water. In order to sustain a human lunar presence, two fundamental and significant factors must be determined: the amount of ice available, and how feasible it is to extract.

The coming years will see NASA dispatching many spacecraft to obtain data on water-ice areas for sustaining the planned Artemis Base Camp and more extended human exploration of the moon.

Many spacecraft will be placed in the Artemis I rocket that is expected to launch in 2021. CubeSats are spacecraft that have Lunar Flashlight designed to study lunar ice. Also included is the Lunar IceCube spacecraft built for searching the moon for ice and other needed resources and determine water and other volatiles' distribution. Meanwhile, the LunaH-Map or Lunar Polar Hydrogen Mapper will map regions for hydrogen in the moon's south pole's shadowed areas.

The Lunar Trailblazer will study and quantify lunar water. It will not launch together with the other spacecraft and Artemis I. It is designed to produce maps that chart water abundance, distribution, and form, and determine environmental conditions that favor lunar water. It discerns the craters which have large deposits of water ice from the "empty" craters or those that have ice, which is hard to extract. It may launch by 2024, together with the IMAP or Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe.

Last June 11, NASA announced a contract of 199.5 million US dollars awarded to Astrobotic Technology to deploy the VIPER or the Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover using its Griffin Lander. VIPER is set to examine lunar environments also to search for water ice; it is equipped with a drill that can reach up to one meter below the lunar surface.

Even if these spacecraft have redundant functions, NASA believes that even more of such spacecraft are required because of the enormity of the task. Now, only probes that sense and remotely measure the lunar water ice have confirmed water's existence. Colorado School of Mines Center for Space Resources director Angel Abbud-Madrid says that the water is only "inferred" and not proven to be enough for NASA's purposes. If NASA is to depend on knowledge that water is in enough quantities, then a more orchestrated and comprehensive survey is needed, particularly spacecraft with impactors and trenching and drilling capacities, along with robotic rovers. This effort is required in order to move forward with longer-term colonization plans, according to Missouri University of Science and Technology geological and mining engineer Leslie Gertsch.

University of Central Florida postdoctoral researcher Kevin Cannon says that determining the quality and amount of water ice will need actual site surveying by humans and robot probes. He also says that the efforts should not be all about science, but also economic potential.

NASA's Acting International And Interagency Relations Associate Administrator Mike Gold says that we do not know what the unknowns are, and we have only begun to gain the knowledge of the geology and physics, as well as the opportunities, present in our moon. He says there are sure to be significant revelations and surprises that await.