Image reconstruction
With NASA planning a manned-space mission to the moon by 2018, the discovery of the exact location of lunar ice is of great importance. The astrophysicists who made the discovery were lead by Dr Vincent Eke of the Institute for Computational Cosmology, at Durham University. The findings were conducted by a research team from Glasgow University and the Planetary Systems Branch, Space Science and Astrobiology Division, of NASA Ames Research Centre in California, USA. The lunar ice is a potential source of fuel and water for moon explorers.

Dr Eke’s involvement began when a scientist from the US got in touch. ‘I had an image reconstruction algorithm,’ says Dr Eke, ‘I’m usually a cosmologist, I was using it for completely different problems. I’d been working on things that were galaxy-sized or bigger until then. But he had a data set that would be suitable for putting through my piece of software.’

Concentrated in shaded craters
The original data revealed a blurred map of the moon, showing the location where hydrogen might be distributed. Dr Eke’s algorithm would remove the blurring and give a precise image. The data was good enough, says Dr Eke, for the team to conclude that ‘the hydrogen is concentrated in the perfectly shaded craters, near to the poles of the moon. And that was something people didn’t know before.’ This discovery was actually one of the main objectives of the LCROSS (Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite) mission sometime this year.

‘They are going to send this missile in,’ says Dr Eke, ‘and look at the plume of debris that comes out. They are going to look for water ice there, or see what form the hydrogen is in. They also wanted to know how much hydrogen was there and if it is concentrated into the craters.’ The temperatures in these polar craters are colder than minus 170 degrees Celsius.

Fuel and water
This information is important for moon exploration. For establishing a base on the moon ‘it’s obviously very important to have fuel and water,’ says Dr Eke. ‘If you combine hydrogen with oxygen you have rocket fuel, and you also have water. Knowing exactly where the hydrogen is on the moon is crucially important. There’s lots of oxygen around, there’s not so much hydrogen, you really want to know where it is.’