The moon is not dry, scientists know this now. But how many drops of water will the thirsty astronauts serve? No one knows with certainty.
A NASA robotic spacecraft called Lunar Trailblazer, which launched on Wednesday evening at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, aims to provide a detailed map of the orbit of abundance, distribution and shape of water through the moon.
Lunar Trailblazer marked the journey towards space on the same rocket Spacex Falcon 9 as Athena, a commercial lunar lunar built by intuitive machines de Houston, which will deploy an instrument from NASA to drill in the moon and sniff water vapors.
Athena will study a place on the moon. Lunar Trailblazer will provide a global image of water on the Moon.
“This is another exciting thing for us because we get more science in space with a launch,” said Nicola Fox, the associate administrator of the NASA scientific mission management during a press conference before the launch.
Less than an hour after takeoff, Lunar Trailblazer and Athena separated. Athena takes a direct path to the moon, with a landing scheduled for March 6, while Lunar Trailblazer embarked on a winding but fuel economy trip which will take four months to reach its destination. After entering orbit, the spaceship will make observations for at least two years.
An area of interest is water in the sunny regions of the moon.
“Does that change according to the time of day?” Bethany Ehlmann, professor of planetary sciences at the California Institute of Technology, who is the main investigator of the mission, in an interview. “You might think about it like almost as a gel that comes and come.”
For decades, the moon is considered a world without water. But from the mid -1990s, the spaceship found signs of ice in the Eternal shadows of craters in the polar regions of the moon.
In 2009, NASA slammed a rocket in one of the craters. Distinct water signatures have been seen In debris accelerated by the impact, confirming the previous indices.
The same year, scientists made a surprising discovery that water was observed not only inside polar craters, but also All around the moon. This came from the observations of light reflected by an instrument of NASA aboard Chandrayaan-1, the first lunar orbit in India.
If the water is somehow more widespread, this could facilitate the future colony of the Moon, especially if large quantities of water could be easily extracted from the soil. The water molecules could then be divided to produce oxygen, for breathable air for astronauts. Hydrogen and oxygen can also be used to supply rockets or generate power.
However, the instrument on board the Indian spaceship, designed to identify minerals on the surface, did not completely cover the wavelength strip necessary to identify how the water was arranged.
The molecules could have been stacked in the form of ice crystals or glued to the surface of minerals – which scientists call adsorbed. These forms of water would probably not be very difficult to collect.
But the signal could also indicate the hydroxyl, a molecular group composed of a hydrogen atom and an oxygen atom, as opposed to the two hydrogen atoms and an oxygen atom of the water.
The hydroxyl would most likely be trapped inside the rocks but could be released in water if it was heated to around 1,000 degrees fahrenheit or more. This would require ovens saving energy to cook piles of rock.
Lunar Trailblazer carries a scientific sensor, built by the NASA jet propulsion laboratory in California, which is similar to the one on board of Chandraya-1. But the new instrument is more advanced and covers all the wavelengths necessary to differentiate ice, adsorbed water and hydroxyl.
The instrument can even make observations in the Shaded regions of the moonwhich are not completely dark because sunlight often rebounds indirectly in the crater. “This is the most fun part,” said Dr. Ehlmann. “It is indeed a kind of double rebound in light.”
A second instrument, built by the University of Oxford in England, will measure the temperature of the surface. “The two instruments work together to obtain this set of simultaneous water temperature data and mineral composition at the same place,” said Dr. Ehlmann.
Lunar Trailblazer is one of a series of robotic scientific missions at a lower cost by NASA. The cost of building and operating the spaceship is $ 94 million. But as a secondary payload on the intuitive mission of the machines, the cost of access to space was only $ 8 million, much less than if NASA had bought a rocket just to launch Lunar Trailblazer.
This is the third mission to be launched from a program called Small, innovative missions for planetary exploration, or Simplex. The first two failed once they arrived in space.
Two other Simplex spacecrafts have lost their journey when problems with the NASA psyche spacecraft delayed the launch and changed the trajectory. One of them, Janus, who was to study asteroids, was canceled.
The other, Escapade, which is to measure the magnetic fields of March, was then transferred to the first launch of New Glenn, the orbital rocket From Blue Origin, the space company founded by Jeff Bezos. But this mission was distant when it appeared that New Glenn would not be ready in time to meet a tight launch window to send it on a specific path to Mars. He is still waiting for his launch.
Lunar Trailblazer has also experienced travel changes. He was originally to ride with the interstellar mission of cartography and acceleration probe, or IMAP, but was then moved to the launch of intuitive machines while the IMAP mission faced a delay.
“Lunar Trailblazer takes place in a lucky period,” said Dr. Ehlmann, “because there is a lot of interest in the moon, which means there are opportunities to go to the moon.”