Water bounty may await Chandrayaan-2: Experts

The Moon’s south pole region is home to some of the most extreme environments in the solar system: it’s unimaginably cold, massively cratered, and has areas that are either constantly bathed in sunlight or in darkness. This is precisely why NASA says it wants to send astronauts there in 2024 as part of its Artemis programme.

“Moon’s south pole region has more shadow than the north pole region, and there are possibly some permanent shadowed region, for example, in the craters, called cold trap,” said Sudip Bhattacharyya, associate professor at Mumbai’s Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR). “So it is more likely that water, in the form of ice, and some other volatile elements are preserved and will be found in the south pole region,” Bhattacharyya, who was not involved in the studies, said. Researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles in the US, describe their study of similarities between craters on Mercury and those on the Moon. In their paper published in the journal Nature Geoscience, they report evidence for thick ice deposits inside permanently shadowed simple craters on Moon.

“We measured the depth/diameter ratio of approximately 2,000 simple craters near the north pole of Mercury using Mercury Laser Altimeter data. We find that these craters become distinctly shallower at higher latitudes, where ice is known to have accumulated on their floors,” researchers wrote in the paper. A parallel investigation of about 12,000 lunar craters using NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) data reveals a similar morphological trend near the south pole of the Moon, which scientists conclude is also due to the presence of thick ice deposits.