The presence of Ice at the Moon's Poles

NASA confirms the Moon has water ice at its poles, and this could power a new age of space exploration.

A team of scientists has directly observed definitive evidence of water ice on the Moon’s surface, in the darkest and coldest parts of its polar regions. This is the first time scientists have directly observed definitive evidence of water ice on the Moon’s surface.

The ice deposits are patchily distributed and could possibly be ancient. At the southern pole, most of the ice is concentrated at lunar craters, while the northern pole’s ice is more widely, but sparsely spread.

A team of scientists, led by Shuai Li of the University of Hawaii and Brown University and including Richard Elphic from NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley, used data from NASA’s Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3) instrument to identify three specific signatures that definitively prove there is water ice at the surface of the Moon.

Above, the distribution of surface ice at the Moon’s south pole (left) and north pole (right), detected by NASA’s Moon Mineralogy Mapper instrument. Blue represents the ice locations, plotted over an image of the lunar surface, where the gray scale corresponds to surface temperature (darker representing colder areas and lighter shades indicating warmer zones).   Credits NASA

source NASA