Last week controllers lost contact with the Indian lunar probe Chandrayaan-1, which was about to embark on a new series of observations in conjunction with the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. Now those radar observations won’t happen, as explained in this New Scientist article.
That sets back the search for ice in lunar craters, which will be vital to future lunar outposts. But this passage especially caught my eye:
Chandrayaan-1 flew over “a lot of little craters that looked like they had ice” and mapped 95 per cent of the polar regions before its mission ended,
according to Stewart Nozette of the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston. That sounds encouraging.
And provided that LCROSS — the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite — doesn’t experience another in-flight emergency, we should get a closer look at the contents of one crater in just a few weeks.
But no matter what any of these probes reveal: in the world of my novel, WALKING ON THE SEA OF CLOUDS, the colonists retrieve ice from the permanently shaded floor of Faustini Crater.
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