India’s space agency is attempting to land a spacecraft on the moon’s south pole, a mission that could advance India’s space ambitions and expand knowledge of lunar water ice, potentially one of the moon’s most valuable resources. Here’s what’s known about the presence of frozen water on the moon – and why space agencies and private companies see it as a key to a moon colony, lunar mining and potential missions to Mars. The Soviet Union, the United States, and China are the only three countries that have successfully carried out soft landings on the Moon. As early as the 1960s, before the first Apollo landing, scientists had speculated that water could exist on the moon. Samples the Apollo crews returned for analysis in the late 1960s and early 1970s appeared to be dry. In 2008, Brown University researchers revisited those lunar samples with new technology and found hydrogen inside tiny beads of volcanic glass. In 2009, a NASA instrument aboard the Indian Space Research Organisation’s Chandrayaan-1 probe detected water on the moon’s surface. In the same year, another NASA probe that hit the south pole found water ice below the moon’s surface. An earlier NASA mission, the 1998 Lunar Prospector, had found evidence that the highest concentration of water ice was in the south pole’s shadowed craters.
Full story : Why are space agencies racing to the moon’s south pole?
