Ice on the Moon

Abstract

Abstract Around the turn of the millennium, NASA was planning new manned Moon landings and commissioned a lunar mapping mission as a precursor. The resulting Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter re-used the Mars orbiter design and carried a version of the Mars Climate Sounder, now called Lunar Diviner, having been modified to make it suitable for mapping the surface of the airless Moon. Oxford built some of the hardware and it worked well, allowing the team to look at ice deposits near the lunar poles. These turned out to be incredibly cold, so that not just water but many other interesting volatile species that might have been present on the Moon in the distant past could be trapped in the deposits. This finding made the team look forward to a manned or robotic mission to obtain the ice cores that must speak volumes about the history of the Earth and the Solar System, but NASA cancelled its whole Moon landing programme, leaving the field open to the Chinese.