From school textbooks, we know that a water molecule consists of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom.

The Russian instrument is sensitive enough to register a hydrogen presence when water content in the Moon's surface is as low as one-tenth of a percentage point by weight. Water ice in near-polar craters, if it exists, will be highlighted as bright specks showing high hydrogen content.

Also scheduled to be launched in 2008 are the first Indian Earth satellite Chandrayaan-1 and the Japanese automated probe Selene, both of which will help to solve the issue of lunar glaciers. The Russian Luna Globe spacecraft will carry out global studies of the Moon in 2010.

After an interval of more than 30 years, Russia is resuming its studies of the Moon's internal structure. It will look for water at the Moon's poles, identify the presence of the core, if any, and determine its size.

The Russian program also provides for landing a fleet of smaller craft in the Moon's equatorial area to set up a network of seismic stations and soil penetrators.

Penetrators are devices that enter lunar soil at high speed to a depth of several meters and make measurements with the help of their instrumentation. Information from these mini-laboratories will be relayed back to the Earth via an orbiter.

The next stage of exploration will be sampling lunar soil and transporting the samples back to the Earth. It will be followed by the Lunny Poligon program, which will set up some infrastructure near the Moon's poles for a future habitable base to carry out a wide range of scientific and technological studies.

The most suitable areas for such a base will be sites with discovered water. Because they are also areas always exposed to the Sun, they could use solar generators to produce electricity to obtain hydrogen fuel from ice for interplanetary ships and the needs of the base.

Scientists also plan a radio astronomical observatory on the Moon. Space radio emissions below certain frequencies are screened off by the earth's ionosphere and cannot be observed from the Earth.

The Moon, which has no ionosphere, is a more convenient place for such investigations, search of planetary systems, study of magnetic and plasma disturbances of solar origin, and solution of many other problems.

A moon telescope would be an antenna field consisting of radio emission receivers spaced over an area of dozens of square kilometers. Information from every element of the system will be fed to its central node and then relayed to the Earth for further processing. If the antenna field is located on the Moon's far side, it will be free of any interfering influence from the Earth and the Sun's radio emissions.

China, too, plans to join the new moon race. In the wake of its orbiter, it is going to send landing modules and remote-controlled lunar vehicles to the Moon. In the course of these missions, samples of lunar soil will be delivered to the Earth.

Considering the push and drive of China's space program, it may well be that the first colonists of the Moon will speak Chinese.

-- (Yury Zaitsev is an expert at the Russian Academy of Sciences' Institute of Space Research. This article is reprinted by permission of the RIA Novosti news agency. The opinions expressed in this article are the author's and do not necessarily represent those of RIA Novosti.)

(United Press International's "Outside View" commentaries are written by outside contributors who specialize in a variety of important issues. The views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of United Press International. In the interests of creating an open forum, original submissions are invited.)

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