Researchers have discovered a reason why ice has persisted on the otherwise bone-dry Moon.
For years, scientists have believed frigid craters at the Moon’s poles hold water ice, which would be both a scientific boon and a potential resource for human missions. Now, researchers have discovered a reason why the ice has persisted on an otherwise bone-dry world: Some polar craters may be protected by ancient magnetic fields.
Hundreds of polar craters are in permanent shadow because of the Moon’s small tilt to the Sun, 1.5° compared with Earth’s 23.4°. The Sun never rises above their rims, keeping temperatures as low as –250°C. In some of the pits, radar instruments on orbiting spacecraft have detected the reflective signature of water ice, perhaps delivered by comet impacts.
Planetary scientist Lon Hood and his colleagues at the University of Arizona now think they know why the ice sticks around. In research presented last week at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston, they showed that magnetic anomalies, remnants from the Moon’s ancient past,. “These anomalies can deflect the solar wind,” Hood says. “We think they could be quite significant in shielding the permanently shadowed regions.
Thousands of the anomalies are thought to exist across the lunar surface, but Hood mapped ones at the south pole in detail using data from Japan’s Kaguya spacecraft, which orbited the Moon from 2007 to 2009. He found at least two permanently shadowed craters that were overlapped by these anomalies, the Sverdrup and Shoemaker craters, and there are likely more. Although the remnant fields are thousands of times weaker than Earth’s, they could be sufficient to deflect the solar wind.
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