Lunar Prospector Neutron Spectrometer Response to Shadow-Constrained Distributions of Water at the Lunar Poles

Details Lunar Prospector Neutron Spectrometer Response to Shadow-Constrained Distributions of Water at the Lunar Poles Lunar Prospector Neutron Spectrometer Response to Shadow-Constrained Distributions of Water at the Lunar Poles

Dec 2004

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2004agufm.p23a0228e&link_type=abstract

American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2004, abstract #P23A-0228

Physics

5410 Composition, 5462 Polar Regions, 5470 Surface Materials And Properties

Scientific paper

Cold-trapped volatiles at the lunar poles are a potential resource for use in long-term human exploration and would provide extremely valuable scientific information stretching back to the early solar system. Lunar Prospector's neutron spectrometer clearly detected polar enhancements of hydrogen, possibly in the form of shallowly buried ice. These data currently provide the most severe constraints on how much water may be present in the Moon's polar regions, and where it may be found. But these data have a surface spatial resolution of 20-30 km. Constraining the plausible locations of enhanced water ice abundance to permanently shaded areas (based on a model of solar illumination of the polar topography), and then convolving the spectrometer response function with the associated surface neutron flux output, we can predict the response that should be seen from orbit. We then iterate to a solution that provides the best agreement between the simulated LP NS "data" and the actual observations. As the illumination models improve, so does the fidelity of the only locations where truly cold-trapped water can be found. We find that water ice concentrations may be greater than 10 wt% in the floors of some smaller craters. These are sites that would prove fruitful in both exploration and science endeavors at the Moon.

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