Hidden away in the moon’s deep shadows are caches of frozen water, organic compounds such as methane, toxics such as mercury, and even traces of silver and gold — a previously unimagined trove of lunar chemistry, scientists announced Thursday.
These compounds and much more were kicked up when a NASA rocket and spacecraft were crashed into the lunar south pole a year ago.
The impact at the Cabeus crater dug a hole one-third the size of a football field and as deep as a swimming pool — setting loose chemical elements that lay in some of the coldest spots in the solar system and haven’t seen sunlight for billions of years.
“This place looks like it’s a treasure chest of elements,” said Brown University planetary geologist Peter Schultz, one of the principal investigators of the NASA mission. He said the compounds migrate to the poles and then get quick-frozen and collect in craters, where they stay “in the permanent shadows.”
Although the presence of some lunar ice and water vapor was reported earlier from that mission, the full richness of what lies in the coldest and darkest reaches of the moon took a year to tease out.
The discoveries, Schultz said, show the moon to be far more chemically complex than presumed during the Apollo era — even after decades of studying lunar rocks — and will forever change how scientists look at the moon.
Water on the moon, if plentiful enough, could be a valuable resource for space exploration. It could not only provide drinking water for astronauts on lengthy missions, but also its hydrogen and oxygen could be used to create rocket fuel. A space-engineering firm in Texas, Stone Aerospace, has been developing long-term plans to do precisely that kind of water mining on the moon’s Shackleton crater.
Schultz was one of six investigators whose papers on the results of the moon crash-landing will be published today in the journal Science.
The mission — called the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, or LCROSS — consisted of a spent rocket that crashed into the moon at twice the speed of a bullet, the data-collecting “shepherding spacecraft” that followed the rocket and passed through the plume of debris created by the crash, and the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter that arrived on the scene as the lunar mayhem was playing out.
Another Science paper using LCROSS data, written by Anthony Colaprete of NASA’s Ames Research Center and colleagues, calculated that the water ice and vapor in the plume was 5.6 percent of its mass, and consequently of the crater’s.
The finding, which had a reporting error of plus or minus 2.9 percent, described a considerably higher concentration of H2O than expected.
Under the Obama administration, a proposed Bush-era effort to set up human colonies on the moon has been largely scrapped. Nevertheless, scientists said, the LCROSS mission was a success in revealing new secrets of the moon.
