Controversies over Lunar Water About to End

The debate on whether the Moon actually holds water, be it frozen or liquid, has been raging on for several decades now, with strong arguments on both sides. Many have argued that the conditions simply do not allow for this, while others have said that ice caps such as those on Mars could exist on the natural satellite as well. Now, the LRO/LCROSS mission is about to launch, and, hopefully, put an end to the squabble for good.

Originally scheduled to take off on Wednesday, June 17th, the date on which the mission will actually be launched is at the moment unknown. Due to a glitch experienced by the shuttle Endeavor, which has a leak on one of its hydrogen tanks, the LRO mission cannot fly from its Cape Canaveral Air Force Base launch site on Wednesday, as that day is scheduled for another attempted lift off of Endeavor, from Launch Pad 39A, at the Kennedy Space Center, in Florida. Mission planners for the two spacecraft are currently discussing options and establishing priorities, as NASA officials inform.

The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) and the LCROSS impactor are two craft specifically designed for lunar analysis. While the former will attempt to detect signs of water on the Moon from the satellite's orbit, the latter will be purposefully slammed in the lunar surface, in hopes of throwing sufficient amounts of debris into the air to allow for their scanning. Spectrography could determine if any of the pieces of dust that will be stirred by the powerful impact contains at least trace amounts of the stuff.

The principal NASA investigator for the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) mission, Anthony Colaprete, says that some deep craters at the Moon's poles have not been exposed to direct sunlight for the last two billion years, and that chances that ice still exists deep within them are great. In the permanent shadows, experts estimate that temperatures are kept at a constant minus 328 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 200 degrees Celsius), more than enough for ice preservation, Space informs.

“It costs about $10,000 to $15,000 per pound to launch something in the space shuttle, and there are about 8 gallons of water to a gallon, so we're talking about $100,000 to bring a gallon of water to low Earth orbit. If we can use the lunar poles as a resource, we could use them as staging bases to go elsewhere on the moon, or beyond the moon, or beyond Mars or Europa or elsewhere we'd want to go. You wouldn't have to bring up millions of gallons of fuel, you could produce it on the moon,” Colaprete said of the opportunities finding water on the Moon would open for space exploration.