Water on the Moon?!

September 24, 8:10 AMDenver Space Industry ExaminerBrian Enke

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The Moon. Credit: NASA

NASA will hold a press conference at noon today (Thursday) to announce details of a stunning discovery on the Moon. Three recent spacecraft have apparently discovered a strong signature of bound hydrogen/oxygen within the upper few centimeters of the lunar regolith over most of the surface of the Moon.

Wow!

This discovery, if true, holds major ramifications for the near-term settlement of the inner solar system. Preliminary reports imply that the bound hydrogen and oxygen must take one of two forms: water or hydroxyl. In either case, human settlers could break the molecules apart into hydrogen and oxygen which could then be used as rocket fuel or recombined into other useful substances... including water (in the case of hydroxyls).

Water, of course, is also the key ingredient for sustaining life as we know it... yet until now, its presence on the moon was believed to be limited to permanently shadowed craters near the lunar poles. These craters are incredibly cold, so retrieving water from them involves robotic processes just beyond the limits of current technology.

Three independent spacecraft (India's Chandrayaan-1 and NASA's Cassini and Deep Impact) all detected strong hydrogen signatures near the lunar poles that taper off towards the equator. In addition, NASA's newly orbiting Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has detected strong hydrogen signatures outside the shadowed craters where its presence was expected.

Speculation time...

Questions remain... and will undoubtedly be discussed in the press conference. The presence of hydrogen seems quite certain now, but where is it exactly? And in exactly what form will we find it?

If the hydrogen is distributed in small quantities across vast swaths of regolith, extracting it will parallel the dilemma faced by engineers who want to extract the energy-rich isotope helium-3 from the regolith. Vast quantities of regolith must be processed in order to retrieve tiny quantities of the good stuff. The energy required and logistical costs of helium-3 mining have convinced some researchers that the enterprise will never get off the ground. Others are more optimistic... and indeed if mining the same material also generates hydrogen or (better) water directly, the cost/benefit analysis probably swings to favor the optimists.

Pessimists will also quickly point out that a lack of hydrogen is not the biggest molecular roadblock to lunar settlement... it's a lack of carbon. The Moon lacks carbon in any useful form or quantity (or so we believe). When bound, hydrogen and carbon form an even more useful team within a Lunar settlement (energy, plastics, etc). So the discovery of water on the Moon, even if it was sitting on the surface in plastic bottles of pure Aquafina, wouldn't solve all our lunar settlement problems. Actually, the plastic bottles would be just as valuable as the water within them.

Regardless of the eventual outcome, this is certainly one exciting announcement. It's also an announcement that the NASA science and human spaceflight communities can both applaud. Let's hope it leads to more, sustained future cooperation between the Science and Exploration Systems Mission Directorates within NASA. Greater cooperation would advance the cause of both organizations perhaps more than the actual discovery of water itself.