NASA has announced plans to send several astronauts to the moon in 2025 to construct the first-ever lunar science base. As ambitious as this may sound, there is one thing that must be accomplished before this dream can be realised. Water!
Astronauts require water to be comfortable in any sci-fi extraterrestrial space station. Researchers claim that there may be a lot more water on the moon than we think, according to a paper published in the journal Scientific Reports. Surprisingly, they believe that this water comes from the Earth.
“As NASA’s Artemis team plans to build a base camp on the moon’s south pole, water ions that originated many aeons ago on Earth can be used in the astronauts’ life support system,” says Gunter Kletetschka, the study’s lead author.
According to NASA, construction of Artemis’ moon base camps will begin at the lunar south pole, where scientists have discovered a large amount of frozen water beneath the surface.
According to new research based on existing lunar gravitational data, there could be an additional 3,500 cubic kilometres of water at the lunar poles. This is almost the same amount of water as Lake Huron in North America, the world’s eighth largest lake.
Researchers believe that hydrogen and oxygen ions from Earth’s upper atmosphere may have fallen into the lunar surface at some point in the past and were repelled into the moon.
Notably, because the moon lacks its own magnetosphere, it would be unable to repel these particles back to Earth. As a result, it had no choice but to accept them on the surface.
Furthermore, these ions may have mixed to form lunar permafrost, which then went through a series of geological processes, causing the frost to sink below the lunar surface. This frost may have turned into liquid water over time.
If confirmed, this massive water supply could be a huge help to NASA’s Artemis mission.
