Ice Store At Moon's South Pole Is A Myth

MOON DAILY

Because of the tilt of the moon's orbital plane relative to the Earth's equatorial plane, the Earth can rise much higher above the horizon at the lunar south pole than the sun, so telescopes on the Earth can "see" some of the shadowed area.

by Staff Writers
Paris (AFP) Oct 18, 2006
Hopes that the Moon's South Pole has a vast hoard of ice that could be used to establish a lunar colony are sadly unfounded, a new study says. In 1994, radar echoes sent back in an experiment involving a US orbiter called Clementine appeared to show that a treasure trove of frozen water lay below the dust in craters near the lunar South Pole that were permanently shaded from the Sun.

If so, such a find would be an invaluable boost to colonisation, as the ice could be used to provide water as well as hydrogen as fuel. NASA is looking closely at the South Pole as a potential site for the United States' return mission to the Moon, scheduled to take place by 2020.

But a paper published in the British science journal Nature on Thursday by a US team says the Clementine data most probably was misinterpreted.

Donald Campbell of Washington's Smithsonian Institution and colleagues collected radar images of the Moon's South Pole to a resolution of 20 metres (65 feet), looking especially at Shackleton crater, which had generated most interest.

The team found that a particular radar signature called the circular polarization ratio -- which in the Clementine experiment was taken to indicate thick deposits of ice -- could also be created by echoes from the rough terrain and walls of impact craters.

The signature was found in both sunny and permanently shady areas of crater, which suggests that the reflection comes from rocky debris, not thick ice deposits.

If there is any ice at the South Pole, it probably comes from tiny, scattered grains that probably account for only one or two percent of the local dust, the authors suggest.

"Any planning for future exploitation of hydrogen at the Moon's South Pole should be constrained by this low average abundance rather than by the expectation of localised deposits at higher concentrations," the paper says soberly.

The research involved sending a radar signal from the Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico. The signal hit the southern lunar region and the reflection was picked up by the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia.

Source: Agence France-Presse

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MOON DAILY

No Lunar Polar Ice Sheets Found In High Resolution Radar Images

Ithaca NY (SPX) Oct 19, 2006
Using the highest resolution radar-signal images ever made of the moon - images from the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Arecibo Telescope in Arecibo, P.R., and the NSF's Robert C. Byrd Telescope in Green Bank, W.Va. - planetary astronomers have found no evidence for ice in craters at the lunar south pole. Cornell University, Smithsonian Institution and Australian scientists report the findings in the latest Nature (Oct. 19, 2006).

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