Mission Overview: Prospecting for lunar water

(CNN) -- It has been more than 25 years since man walked on the moon, but for space explorers, its allure has never waned.

This year, earthly adventurers again answered the moon's tempting call, not with a manned mission as in 1972, but with a squat, drum-shaped spacecraft which, unlike the 1972 mission, is making a one-way trip.

The Lunar Prospector craft, launched on January 5, took almost five days to reach the moon. It then eased into an orbit which it is expected to stay for up to 18 months. Using spectrometers and a magnetometer, the craft is scanning the moon for minerals and water, and mapping its magnetic fields and gravity. When it runs out of fuel, the Prospector will simply crash into the moon.

The $65 million spacecraft, which is 4 feet tall and weighs 660 pounds, is an example of NASA's new generation of "smaller, faster and cheaper" space projects.

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Among the questions NASA asked Lunar Prospector to answer is whether there is water ice on the moon. Indeed, it now appears, there is ice on the moon, the presence of which could provide a tremendous impetus to future space missions. With the proper fuel to melt the ice into water, future astronauts staying at lunar outposts could drink it and breathe the oxygen released from breaking it down.

Liquid hydrogen and oxygen generated by breaking down water into its elements could also be used to generate power, including rocket fuel, making the moon a possible spacecraft refueling station.

Scientists do not yet know whether the lunar ice could serve those purposes.

The idea that ice might be trapped in the moon's crevices and craters dates back to the 1960s, when geophysicists "proved, using mathematical models, that water molecules bouncing around could get trapped," said Cal Tech geophysicist Bruce Murray, who co-authored the first paper on lunar ice.

But it was not until the Pentagon sent up a space probe named Clementine in 1994 that any hard evidence supporting the ice theory was found.

Clementine, designed to test navigation skills for the so-called "Star Wars" missile defense program, took radar images of the moon's south pole as an afterthought. The images, beamed back to Earth, suggested that four football fields' worth of dirty ice might be hidden in the moon's shadows.

It now appears that Clementine was right.

 

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Related story:

• NASA readies for moon mission - December 4, 1997

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