The frequent impact of meteorites on the moon's surface churns the soil and affects where future explorers could find deposits of lunar ice.
Near the moon’s poles, crater walls block sunlight from reaching some areas of the surface. In these permanently shadowed regions, temperatures are ghastly cold, which could allow water to exist in the form of ice. But on an airless body like the moon, the constant barrage of meteorites that punch into the soil could mean that near-surface ice is short-lived and thicker deposits of ice are buried deeper.The moon’s tenuous atmosphere provides little-to-zero protection against meteorite strikes.
In addition to the cold-traps in large, deep craters, there are many more, smaller cold-traps in shallower craters, says Paul Hayne, a planetary scientist at the University of Colorado Boulder.last year, Hayne and a team of researchers showed that there are many of these micro-cold-traps. “The most common cold-traps are probably about the size of a quarter,” he says.
“We’re likely not going to find thick, coherent deposits of ice in the uppermost few meters of the average cold-trap because impact gardening would have pummelled it to bits, if not removed it altogether,” says Costello.
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