NASA Artemis Heading To Lunar South Pole But Water Could Be Present In Sunnier Regions

NASA’s Artemis program will send astronauts to one of the most extreme environments in the solar system: the south pole region of the moon.

The southernmost region of the moon features massive craters that prevent light from reaching the deep interior of the rims. In these craters with permanent darkness, NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) has measured the coldest temperatures in the solar system.

These craters have also been thought of as the perfect environment for preserving water for eons, but the findings of a new research suggest otherwise.

Plasma physicist William Farrell, from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and colleagues found that despite temperatures reaching -388 degrees Fahrenheit (-233 Celsius) and presumably being kept frost locked in soil for virtually forever, water gradually escapes the topmost, super thin layer of the moon’s surface.

The moon has no atmosphere that provides protection to its surface, so when the sun spews solar wind, some of these charged particles strike the lunar surface and cause water molecules to bounce around new locations.

Meteorites that smash into the surface can also uproot soil with frozen water and hurtle the soil particles as far as 19 miles away from the impact site.

Researchers said that these impacts could cause thin layer of ice grain to spread across the surface, where they are exposed to solar heat and the space environment, and eventually get submitted or lost to environmental processes.

Calculations made by Farrell and his team revealed that the topmost layer of polar crater floors is getting reworked for thousands of years, which means that the faint patches of frost detected using LRO’s Lyman Alpha Mapping Project (LAMP) instrument could be just 2,000 years old and not millions or billions of years old as some may expect.

“The floor of these craters are also exposed to the space environment including incoming meteors and ionized gases from the sun (that migrate into the shadowed craters via plasma expansion processes),” the researchers wrote in their study.

“We show that the flux of these external environmental processes can erode the frost ‐ with a layer of 1/2 of a micron of frosty soil being eroded on time scales of less than 2000 years.”

The findings of the study published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters offer good news to the forthcoming Artemis mission.

The scattering of water particles means that the astronauts may no longer have to subject themselves and their instruments to the harsh environments, or shadowed crater floors on the moon to find water-rich soil, since they could find this in nearby sunny regions.

“This research is telling us that meteoroids are doing some of the work for us and transporting material from the coldest places to some of the boundary regions where astronauts can access it with a solar-powered rover,” said planetary scientist Dana Hurley, from Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland.