No spacecraft had ever before reached the water-rich region future astronauts hope to call home.
, a Japanese probe carrying a rover built by the United Arab Emirates came to ruin in the same region, when it too lost contact with Earth and went into a 4.8 km death plunge before making impact with the surface.
The moon’s south pole is one of the harder places on the lunar surface to land because it is heavily boulder strewn, without the wide, flat expanses that the Apollo astronauts and early uncrewed landers targeted in the equatorial regions of the moon’s Earth-facing hemisphere. Of the spacecraft that have crashed in the south pole, none got close enough to try to negotiate the boulder fields.
Despite the hazards, there is good reason for the world’s space agencies and private space companies to continue targeting the south pole. Scientists had long believed that the lunar regolith—or soil—might be shot through with crystals of water ice. More significantly, there had been speculation that permanently shadowed craters in the south pole might effectively be frozen lakes. India’s, launched in 2008, proved those theories correct.
For future astronauts hoping to settle the moon and live off the land, that matters a lot. Not only can ice be harvested for0 molecule can be broken down to provide breathable oxygen, and the hydrogen and oxygen can be recombined to make rocket fuel. It’s for that reason that
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