A pioneering mission will get some answers. This is the Lunar Trailblazer probe of NASA that will begin orbiting the Moon next year. This will help solve a persistent mystery: Where is the Moon’s water? One way to decipher “those icy secrets“, as NASA refers to it.
According to the official entity’s report, scientists have seen signs that suggest that water exists even where temperatures soar on the lunar surface and there is good reason to believe that it can be found as surface ice in permanently shadowed craters, places that have not seen direct sunlight for billions of years.
But, until now, there have been few definitive answers, and a full understanding of the nature of the Moon’s water cycle remains. being unattainable so this mission is an advance.
Trailblazer
The Lunar Trailblazer, managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory run by Caltech in Pasadena, California comes into play to elucidate the history of liquid movements trapped in the form of ice.
NASA’s small satellite will map water on the Moon’s surface in unprecedented detail to determine the abundance, location, shape and how water changes over time.
“Making high-resolution measurements of the type and amount of lunar water will help us understand the lunar water cycle and provide clues to other questions, such as how and when Earth got its water,” said Bethany Ehlmann, Lunar Trailblazer principal investigator. at Caltech.
“But understand the lunar water inventory “It is also important if we want to establish a sustained human and robotic presence on the Moon and beyond,” he added.
Future explorers could process ice lunar to create breathable oxygen or even fuel. And they could also carry out science, said the entity responsible for aeronautical and aerospace research, as well as the civil space program.
Using information from Trailblazer, future human or robotic scientific research could take samples of the ice to study later to determine where the water comes from.
For example, the presence of ammonia in ice samples may indicate that the water comes from comets. On the other hand, the sulfur could show that it was ejected to the surface from the lunar interior when the Moon was young and volcanically active.
Analyze the ice
In the future, scientists could analyze the ice inside of permanently shadowed craters to learn more about the origins of water on the Moon,” said Rachel Klima, deputy principal investigator for Lunar Trailblazer at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland.
“Just as an ice core from a glacier on Earth can reveal the ancient history of our planet’s atmospheric composition, this pristine lunar ice could provide Clues to where that water came from and how and when it got there.” Understanding whether water molecules move freely across the Moon’s surface or are trapped within rock is also scientifically important.
Water Molecules Could Move From ‘Cold Traps’ frost to other places throughout the lunar day. Frost heated by the Sun sublimates (turns from solid ice to gas without passing through a liquid phase), allowing molecules to move as a gas to other cold places, where they could form new frost as the Sun moves above.
Knowing how water moves on the Moon could also lead to new knowledge about water cycles in other airless bodies, such as asteroids.
The mission was selected by NASA’s Small Innovative Missions for Planetary Exploration (SIMPLEX) program and will travel on the same launch as the delivery of Intuitive Machines-2 to the Moon through NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services initiative. NASA.
Revision
This NASA device passed a critical review of operational readiness in early October after completing environmental testing in August in Colorado, where it was assembled.
The orbiter and its scientific instruments are now undergoing tests of flight system software that simulate key aspects of the launch, maneuvers and scientific mission while in orbit around the Moon.
At the same time, the operations team is carrying out tests to simulate command, communication with NASA’s Deep Space Network and navigation.
Lunar Trailblazer will provide new insights on the water cycle on the Moon and NASA is already celebrating the launch in a few months.
FUENTE: NASA / DIARIO LAS AMERICAS