NASA is serious about returning to the moon. And that means getting out the big guns—or in this case, a briefcase-sized laser-shooting satellite.
“For me, this is a dream measurement,” says David Paige, a planetary scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles who has been part of the mission since its inception nearly a decade ago. “It’s an opportunity to make a real rapid advancement with such a small spacecraft.” Once the team has mapped out the distribution of surface ice at the South Pole, they can use it to guide future landers, rovers, and eventually humans to places where they can collect frosty samples..
Lunar ice is also scientifically interesting, Prem says, because it may be preserving an ancient record of how water arrived in the Earth-moon system. Someday, frozen samples from the moon could be transported to our own planet and analyzed for molecular fingerprints that reveal the ice’s origins. The presence of carbon, for instance, would suggest that water arrived from asteroids or comets. Sulfur would mean it came from volcanoes.
Paige notes that last week marked the 50th anniversary of Apollo 17, the last time humans set foot on lunar soil. Since then, he says, scientists have learned so much more about what the moon can reveal about our cosmological past, and what resources it may offer for our interstellar future. “The push to go to the moon is very exciting,” Paige says, and the Lunar Flashlight is an important contribution to that effort—“no matter what we discover.
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