Unusual lunar space mission could fast forward plans to set up Moon colonies

A space mission is launching this week to send a probe to the Moon to pinpoint lunar water on its surface.

The Lunar Trailblazer is a two-year mission that is scheduled to take off on Thursday (27 February) on a SpaceX Falcon rocket.

A lot of people may think of the Moon is just a dusty and cold world, but scientists recently uncovered significant suggestions that Earth’s only natural satellite has significant quantities of water. The probe will reveal how much water is near the surface and will also map the locations where it can be found.

Water on the Moon could help propel plans to set up colonies. With the help of solar power plants as a source of power, water could be turned into its elements of hydrogen and oxygen, with the former being used as fuel and oxygen could help astronaut staff breathe.

The previous assumption was that water molecules brought to the moon by meteorites and comets would be broken down quickly by sunlight into hydrogen and oxygen which would then drift into space. However, recent robotic probes have found evidence that there is water, which is primarily ice, found in deep craters that never receive sunlight. The lunar south pole is a key area of interest for the search of ice because it is never exposed to sunlight.

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Lunar Trailblazer has been designed to map out water found on the Moon’s surface using an infrared scanner and a thermal mapper that is described as an advanced heat camera. The two instruments should be able to generate a water map.

Professor Neil Bowles, leader of the team of physicists at Oxford University who built the thermal mapper, told The Guardian: “This is primarily a scientific mission. However, it should also tell us how water is transported across the lunar surface and that has implications for future lunar exploration by humans.”

Bowles added: “We know there is water at the Moon’s poles but we are not sure how it ended up there. We think there is a kind of lunar water cycle just as there is one on Earth although in the case of the one on the Moon it has nothing to do with clouds or rain.

“Either water is delivered by comets or meteorites that hit the lunar surface and release lots of water which then condenses in cold traps at the poles. Alternatively very thin layers of water may be formed by reactions in the lunar soil.”

Bowles says it is currently unknown how the water would move around and “build up into ice deposits”. This is what the scientists are hoping to find out.

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