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NASA announced Sept. 20 that its Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER) mission will land near the western edge of Nobile Crater, near the lunar south pole. VIPER is scheduled to arrive there in late 2023, delivered by Astrobotic’s Griffin lunar lander on a mission arranged through NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program.
This should be interesting. Hopefully they make a positive detection.
Glaze and others described VIPER as a “ground truthing” mission to see exact what forms ice is in at the south pole of the moon. “We know there’s water ice there, and we know some of it is at the surface and some is below the surface,” Colaprete said. “Exactly where and how much, and how it’s distributed between the surface and subsurface, is a large unknown.” VIPER, he added, will also look for ice in locations where scientists don’t think water ice exists as a test of their hypotheses. “If we find there’s no water in any place we look,” he added, “that is a fundamental discovery and we will be scratching our heads and rewriting textbooks again.”
Why would they say we know there IS water there and then if we dont find water? If they know, and if they have announced it, then they should be sure they will find it. If their instruments and data say there is water there, then it is a done-deal. Just covering their backs I guess.
Why would they say we know there IS water there and then if we dont find water? If they know, and if they have announced it, then they should be sure they will find it. If their instruments and data say there is water there, then it is a done-deal. Just covering their backs I guess.
What they detected from orbit is hydrogen. It's probably in the form of water ice, but they won't know until they check directly. Perhaps it's frozen ammonia or methane? The results may tell us a little more about the history of the Earth-Moon system, and they may learn how difficult it is to extract for use as rocket propellant or lunar station supplies.
What did they find out when they crashed all those spent space rockets into the Moon. I thought that was supposed to give us the composition of the materials within the craters - unless they did that to destroy the aliens living in those craters ! (thats a joke by the way)
There's only so much you can find from the thermal energy generated by a spacecraft impact. At some point you have to go in closer for a better look. I think it's fair to say that our modern understanding of how the Earth-Moon system formed was made possible by lunar samples brought back during the Apollo program.
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