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The Honolulu Advertiser

Posted on: Monday, April 21, 2003

UH sets sights on lunar poles

By Jan TenBruggencate
Advertiser Science Writer

The University of Hawai'i is leading a team that wants NASA to drop ground-penetrating instruments into the poles of the moon to find out what kinds of ice exist there.

"Scientifically, the lunar poles are a very interesting region," said Paul Lucey, a geologist and geophysicist at the university's Hawai'i Institute of Geophysics and Planetology. The same people who devised the military's so-called "bunker-buster" bombs will help develop vehicles that can survive lunar impact.

If there are dense deposits of water, methane and other materials frozen at the poles, they could serve as refueling stations for spacecraft and also could support the establishment of lunar colonies.

"Water is a potential resource, which you don't have to haul from the Earth," said Lucey, principal investigator in Polar Night, a mission being proposed to NASA by the University of Hawai'i along with the Naval Research Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories and numerous other universities.

Near the moon's poles are craters and depressions that are dark all the time. They are so cold that materials such as water and methane can't escape. Scientists believe these compounds have been deposited over time by impacts from comets and other space objects.

The research program already has built and tested electronics capable of withstanding high impact.

"We put a neutron spectrometer and a mass spectrometer in a 5-inch-diameter-by-2-foot artillery shell and shot it into 6 feet of plywood. Then we dug it out and both worked," Lucey said.