Scientific American By Leonard David on June 24, 2020
The space agency’s plans for sustainable lunar outposts could hinge on finding—and using—what may be the moon’s most precious resourceNASA’s Artemis program has been called ambitious for its goal of returning humans to Earth’s moon as early as 2024. But its most audacious aspiration is something else entirely: a plan to usher in an era of sustainable lunar operations by mining the moon’s reserves of water ice. Once tapped, this extraterrestrial reservoir could become the elixir of life to support human outposts, supplying not only drinking water but also oxygen and even rocket fuel.
Although water ice has been detected in the shadowy depths of craters at the natural satellite’s poles, there remains a paucity of in-depth scientific data to truly tag it as water-rich. Creating a sustainable human presence on the moon requires addressing two major, fundamental unknowns: Just how much ice is available to use there? And just how hard would it be to extract?
Over the next few years, NASA will dispatch an array of spacecraft to quench its thirst for more water-ice data—and to sustain its quest for an Artemis Base Camp to support wide-ranging human lunar exploration.
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https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/nasas-hunt-for-lunar-water-intensifies/
