NASA scientists are launching two missions to mine ice water stored on the moon in an attempt to help lay the foundations to extend the possibility of human survival outside the Earth.
The two missions, Lunar Flashlight and the Resource Prospector Mission are set to launch in 2017 and 2018.
"If you're going to have humans on the moon and you need water for drinking, breathing, rocket fuel, anything you want, it's much, much cheaper to live off the land than it is to bring everything with you," said Lunar Flashlight principal investigator Barbara Cohen.
With a target launch date of December 2017, Lunar Flashlight will be the first flight of NASA's Space Launch System megarocket. The project includes sending a spacecraft the size of a cereal box to space, which will expand to 860-square feet on its way to the moon.
The probe is expected to orbit the moon for six months before spending a year approximately 12 miles from its surface. The craft will then orbit from a low altitude to map water deposits in icy and dark craters.
The probe's mission is to mine and analyze ice water found near the lunar poles that could be used for future space travelers. NASA scientists hope that water found on the moon could potentially provide a source of drinking water and a source of rocket fuel when hydrogen and oxygen are separated from the water.
"What we're looking for is water right at the surface," Cohen says. "Could humans or their vehicles go into a permanently shadowed region and just scoop up the regolith and use what's at the surface to be able to extract water ice?"
NASA's second mission, the Resource Prospector Mission (RPM), will launch a rover to land on the moon's surface to closely analyze moon ice. Expected to land on a lunar polar site, the rover will map the surfaces of the moon that contain concentrations of hydrogen.
The rover will use a near-infrared spectrometer to measure surface water and also a neuron spectrometer to measure up to 3.3 feet of water underground. Just like the Lunar Flashlight, the RPM's rover will use solar power but will rely on batteries in the dark.
It also shares the overall goal of bringing scientists a step closer to the future of water sources.
"We need to take the first steps in demonstrating off of this world utilization of material," RPM project scientist Tony Colaprete said. "There's a lot of technology demonstration in here that's not just applicable to the moon; it's applicable to any mission, to any surface where you want to manipulate materials."
NASA is not the only one making steps to lunar water exploitation. Private firms Moon Express and Shackleton Energy Co. also plan to mine moon water in the future.
Even though extraterrestrial life does not exist on the moon, Earthlings may one day be able to live on the largest satellite in our solar system.
