NASA Sending Rover Named VIPER To Map Moon's Ice Deposits

Water here on Earth is, mostly, a natural and renewable resource. When accumulation runs low, rains finally fill them back up again. On the moon, still, H2O acts more like oil or gold—acquire calmly over an age and essentially staying put. Before any future missions can set up ice mines, we'll have to know where the stuff is. To that end, NASA is planning to send a prospecting rover to the moon. If all goes well, the golf-cart sized Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER) will spend the holiday season of 2022 trundling across the lunar south pole, drilling and sniffing the soil for signs of ice. The map it produces will be essential to both scientists trying to better understand where the moon's water came from, and thirsty future astronauts. “We’re really at the crossroads of where science and exploration come together,” says Anthony Colaprete, the VIPER project scientist. Get your hands on enough moon water, and you've got a lot of what you need to run a lunar outpost. On top of drinking and bathing in the stuff, a properly applied electric current can split H2O into hydrogen for rocket fuel and oxygen for breathing. How much useful water we can practically wring from the moon, however, remains an open question. "Ultimately, we're interested in whether or not this water represents a reserve in the way we think about oil reserves or natural gas reserves," Colaprete says. Rough estimates for water quantities at each lunar pole range from 100 million to 1 billion metric tons—more than enough for any number of Antarctica-style outposts. But for major space metropolises, humanity may have to look elsewhere. Transplant New York City to a lunar pole in January, for instance, and at one billion gallons per day it would suck the area permanently dry before the end of the year. Researchers know that thin films of perhaps a few molecules cling to dust grains, but probably not in substantial quantities. More exciting are the results from the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS), which NASA intentionally crashed into the Moon’s south pole in 2009. Amidst the dust it kicked up researchers detected signs of real grains of water ice. Colaprete, LCROSS’s principle investigator, likens the ice shards in the soil to bits of sugar mixed in with coffee grounds. This kind of water may actually be the most accessible to astronauts. Ice vaporizes directly upon contact with the vacuum of space, so collecting water could prove as simple as stirring up the dirt and catching the resulting vapor with a tarp.

By – Abhishek Singh
Content - https://www.popsci.com/nasa-mapping-moon-water-ice/