Moon May Hold Billions of Tons of Subterranean Ice at Its Poles

https://eos.org/research-spotlights/moon-may-hold-billions-of-tons-of-subterranean-ice-at-its-poles

Source: By Jerald Pinson, Eos/AGU. 

Excerpt: New research indicates that if even a moderate amount of the water delivered by asteroids to the Moon was sequestered, the lunar poles would contain gigaton deposits (1 billion metric tons) of ice in sheltered craters and beneath its surface. ...“We looked at the entire time history of ice deposition on the Moon,” said Kevin Cannon, a planetary scientist at the Colorado School of Mines in Golden and lead author of the new study in the AGU journal Geophysical Research Letters. Cannon and his team used conservative estimates for the amount of water that asteroids were likely to contain upon impact with the Moon and how much of it was likely to be retained once the dust had settled. ...“If the very oldest regions have been stable and accumulating ice for billions of years, then some could have very substantial deposits, but they might be buried up to 10 meters deep or more,” Cannon said.... 

Popular posts from this blog

Stellar remains of famed 1987 supernova found at last

Planets around dead stars offer glimpse of the Solar System’s future—after the Sun swallows us up

The Smallest Moon of Mars May Not Be What It Seemed