Water ice just discovered on the surface of the moon, a game-changer for the cost of Moon Base Alpha.
This image from the PNAS paper shows the distribution of surface ice at the moon’s south and north poles (left and right here). Blue/Green dots represents ice locations, and the gray scale corresponds to surface temperature, with darker gray representing colder areas and lighter shades indicating warmer ones (black shadows are permanently shaded regions inside craters).
The map comes from a new analysis of the data from NASA’s Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3) instrument, which flew aboard India’s Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft. Salient quotes from PNAS:
“We found direct and definitive evidence for surface-exposed water ice in the lunar polar regions. The abundance and distribution of ice on the Moon are distinct from those on other airless bodies in the inner solar system such as Mercury and Ceres, which may be associated with the unique formation and evolution process of our Moon. These ice deposits might be utilized as an in situ resource in future exploration of the Moon.
The observation of spectral features of H2O confirms that water ice is trapped and accumulates in permanently shadowed regions of the Moon, and in some locations, it is exposed at the modern optical surface.
the southern polar region exhibits a great number of ice-bearing pixels than the north because of more shaded regions in the former. Ice detections in the south are clustered near the craters Haworth, Shoemaker, Sverdrup, and Shackleton, while those in the north are more isolated. Our ice detections near both lunar poles exhibit no bias between the near side and far side, while the former may have been affected by earthshine, which suggests that our ice detections received negligible or no effects from earthshine. In total, only ∼3.5% of cold traps at both lunar poles exhibit ice signatures, reinforcing the distinction between the Moon and other bodies such as Mercury and Ceres where near-surface ice distribution appears to be controlled primarily by temperature and thus more common in cold traps.”
From http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2018/08/14/1802345115
And here are the conclusions from the initial gathering for Moon Base Alpha, back in 2014 https://www.facebook.com/jurvetson/posts/10158035904590611
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