January 2021
Evolution of volatiles on the Moon
... has been determined that the Moon holds a significant amount of frozen water (H2O) and hydroxyl (OH) in its permanently shadowed regions (PSRs), and as lunar scientists dig deeper to understand how it got there a whole new world of exciting results...
October 2018
Mining the Moon for fun and profit
... This suggests that one solution to the power problem is to reflect sunlight from the nearly permanently sunlit regions into the permanently shadowed region using a heliostat (a concave mirror that tracks the Sun). In fact, a similar solution is used...
November 2019
PROSPECTing for lunar polar volatiles
... surface temperatures; this makes the poles a most frigid and unwelcoming place to hang around. Indeed, within Permanently Shadowed Regions (PSRs) temperatures may have been as low as ~30 kelvin (about -240 degrees Celsius) for geological timescales...
26 October 2020
Scientists detect molecular water and cold ‘water traps’ on the Moon
... might reach. It was suggested that at the very least, water ice would be trapped in large permanently shadowed regions in the Moon’s polar regions; regions known for their extremely low temperatures. Interestingly, it was thought that if water was...
May 2020
Developing a commercial market for small sample return
...will be critical to enabling sample return from the most mysterious parts of the lunar surface, such as the permanently shadowed regions. In practice, we think it could work like this: a robot arm on a lander would fit a series of sample tubes, based...
December 2021
All for one and one for all – recommendations for a sustainable future in lunar exploration
.... A pertinent example of potential commercially important activities is the extraction and use of water ice from lunar permanently shadowed regions. Rather than be transported to Earth, these polar volatiles will likely be utilised in situ for the...
