Chandrayaan-1 finds water on the Moon
Using data from a NASA radar that flew aboard India's Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft, scientists have detected ice deposits on the Moon near its north pole.
This is exciting news the World over because water is a key factor in the ability of an extra terrestrial environment to support life. The SSTL team is also watching with great interest because the payload is controlled by a specially built on-board computer (OBC) built by its team in Guildford - its first to be flown onboard a lunar mission. The OBC is programmed to control the instrument and to store the payload data which is then beamed back to the astounded NASA scientists on Earth.
NASA's Mini-SAR instrument found more than 40 small craters with water ice. The craters range in size from 1 to 9 miles (2 to 15 km) in diameter. Although the total amount of ice depends on its thickness in each crater, it's estimated there could be at least 1.3 trillion pounds (600 million metric tons) of water ice.
During the past year, the Mini-SAR mapped the Moon's permanently-shadowed polar craters that aren't visible from Earth. The radar uses the polarisation properties of reflected radio waves to characterise surface properties. Results from the mapping showed deposits having radar characteristics similar to ice.
The revelations don't stop there. Another NASA Moon mission called LCROSS has found that compounds such as hydrocarbons are mixed up in the lunar ice. Speaking to the BBCNASA's Dr Spudis, said:
Now we can say with a fair degree of confidence that a sustainable human presence on the Moon is possible. It's possible using the resources we find there.
The OBC695B on board computer was delivered by SSTL to BAE Systems in just 9 months. The radiation-hard computer was specially designed for robust operation in a lunar orbit, enhancing a design validated by the GIOVE-A satellite that is orbiting in a Medium Earth Orbit 2 years beyond its design life.
