‘We had no idea’: Unpublished image of the Moon’s south pole confirms the best news for NASA

“If there is water ice, this water ice can be recovered and used in consumables for astronauts.“It could be used to protect astronauts from harmful space radiation, and water could be used in rocket fuel,” added Jacob Pletcher, NASA’s chief exploration scientist, said David Kring, a planetary scientist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston. To the euphoria caused by the discovery made on Earth’s only natural moon: “50 years ago, we had no idea there was ice on the moon“.

The images were obtained thanks to the orbital camera, which was deployed in 2009 and has been carrying out space missions since then, and NASA’s ShadowCam instrument, which was recently launched in 2022 using the KARI spacecraft. NASA has already begun organizing its new exploration targets on the Moon: “It’s the first time we’ve seen what it’s like inside, if it’s different from other regular boxes“We can look for frost, and one of the things we can see are changes in frost coverage,” continued the report compiled by National Geographic.

The crater in question, which ended up being key to progress in the space race, would be between 3.6 and 3.7 billion years old, as revealed by a scientist from the VIPER project (also known as the Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover): Very old and deteriorated nozzle. Our team has estimated that it is between 3.6 and 3.7 billion years old.” “It has a beautiful conical entrance from the north…it almost looks like it was designed for a rover to enter.” The idea is that the crater will be explored in depth with the Artemis 3 mission in 2025..