Any lingering hopes that the Moon may contain hidden deposits of ice at its poles have been dashed by a study using ground-penetrating radar, which shows that even at its extremities, Earth's satellite seems waterless.Smithsonian Institution researcher Bruce Campbell and colleagues scanned the lunar poles using a radar with a wavelength of 70 centimetres (30 inches), which is capable of penetrating several metres (yards) of dust and which would strongly reflect any thick ice.
But the radar images yielded no evidence of any significant deposits of frozen water.
"Any ice in these regions must be in the form of disseminated grains or thin (centimetres [inches] or less) interbedded layers," Campbell's team reports in Thursday's issue of Nature, the British science weekly.
The findings confirm scans of the Moon's surface by unmanned missions, notably the 1998-9 US spacecraft Lunar Prospector.
The absence of detectable water could be because impacts with the lunar surface by icy comets have been few, the scientists say.
Alternatively, any water that rises to the lunar surface is rapidly lost into space.
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Nov 02, 2006
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