NASA’s discovery of water on the Moon’s surface could accelerate the future of space exploration, according to astrobiologist Kathy Campbell.
This illustration highlights the Moon’s Clavius Crater with an illustration depicting water trapped in the lunar soil there, along with an image of NASA’s Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) that found sunlit lunar water. Photo: NASA
Last month the American space agency published two reports about the ‘unambiguous detection of molecular water’ on the Moon’s surface.
While it is not the first time water had been discovered on Earth’s only natural satellite, it did excite Professor Campbell – astrobiologist and geologist at the University of Auckland’s School of Environment.
“It’s really important for us in terms of human exploration of deep space, meaning out to the Moon and beyond the Moon,” she told Kathryn Ryan.
“It’s very hard to get resources off of Earth onto a place like the Moon or Mars and for humans to explore because of the gravity, it just pulls it back, there’s so much energy to get those materials, so if you can make things like rocket fuel out of water, which you can do, or oxygen and drinking water, and you can do it on the Moon then suddenly you’ve got a petrol station and a place to refuel and get ready in a much cheaper and easier way to go on and explore the rest of the solar system.”
With the US’s 30-year hiatus on lunar exploration because of the Vietnam War, other countries have stepped forward to map the Moon, Professor Campbell says.
China has rovers on the far side of the moon, while Israel and India have been preparing to build infrastructure on it, and for good reason, she said.
“[Scientists] are relying on this to get these programmes underway, there’s supposed to be the Artemis programme – they’re supposed to land a man and a woman on the moon in 2024, that’s just around the corner – and everything we do on the Moon which is only 384,000 kms away we have to be able to do if we’re actually going to go to Mars which is 225,000,000 kms away.”
With Mars in mind, Professor Campbell said the discovery on the Moon will open up a world of possibilities for humans as a space faring civilisation.
“We’ve got all kinds of problems on Earth but when we do things like explore or get to the Moon it transforms us, we get new technology, we see ourselves in a whole different way, we start to understand the fact that we have limited resources we’re like a little spaceship.
“Even though some would say it’s an incremental step, I would say ‘now we know that we can probably make these resources on the Moon’ and it becomes more realistic and there are plenty of futurists who are putting a lot money into this and it is galvanising, in fact they’re almost single-handedly bringing the whole space programme globally forward, so I think it’s overall a real positive.”
