No ice! No worries - we never thought it was there anyway - October 24, 2008
A paper came out online in Science yesterday with new images from Japan’s SELENE (also known as KAGUYA) spacecraft, which is currently orbiting the moon.
The authors report that they see no ice down there in the crater. Uh-oh. Does this mean that when we colonise the Moon, we'll only have cans of fizzy pop to drink?
The question about ice on the Moon is a long standing debate. There are two camps in the world of moon science; one claiming that there is ice and the other, yes, you guessed it, saying “oh no there isn’t”.
So this latest paper seems to be a victory for the non-ice camp, according to the coverage the news has received (MSNBC New York Times, Thaindian News) and a slightly more measured story from the Economist.
But hang on a minute, according to Ben Bussey, from Johns Hopkins University, no-one ever expected surface ice on the Moon anyway. “The absence of the presence of ice is not surprising given all previous data predicts that the ice is buried,” he told me. Bussey claims to be in neither of the aforementioned camps, but does say that he’d like to think ice is there. “The data is tantalisingly supportive”. But be clear – we’re talking about sub-surface ice here.
Forget the ice question, Bussey suggests, what this particular piece of work shows is some stunning images that for the first time allow us to look into the crater. Groovy.
And soon, thanks to the launch the other day of India's Chandraayan-1 (see the post from earlier today whooping it up for the launch), we might really see whether there’s ice buried in the crater or nor. The Indian space craft took with it an instrument that Bussey is co-investigator on – a radar specifically designed to look for ice called mini-RF. Come January, we might know for sure.
Image: Science
