Ice Ice Maybe: New Ways to Search for Frozen Water on the Moon
Researchers are developing new methods to locate frozen water on the Moon to support future NASA Artemis missions. The project uses specialized vacuum chambers to simulate lunar conditions and analyze how regolith interacts with ice.
Why it matters
Identifying lunar water sources is critical for sustaining long-term human presence and research on the Moon.
The image released in 2018 shows the distribution of surface ice at the Moon's south pole (left) and north pole (right), detected by NASA's Moon Mineralogy Mapper instrument. Blue represents the ice locations, plotted over an image of the lunar surface, where the gray scale corresponds to surface temperature (darker representing colder areas and lighter shades indicating warmer zones). The new approach developed by Lisabeth, Schmerr, and Siegler could help future rovers and astronaut teams locate these ice deposits from the surface.
Harrison Lisabeth is photographed with the Frozen Regolith Observation and Sublimation Testbed (FROST) vacuum chamber at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The device allows scientists to see how physical and chemical forces affect rock samples in the subzero vacuum conditions of the moon. Lisabeth’s work contributes to the effort to find lunar ice.
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