Probe Reveals Ice Content of Moon’s Shackleton Crater

Probe Reveals Ice Content of Moon’s Shackleton Crater

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Up to 22 percent of the surfaces of Shackleton Crater, located near the moon’s south pole, may be water ice, new findings from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter show. That may sound like a lot, but it adds up to only about 100 gallons of water inside the 12-mile wide, two-mile deep crater.

“It’s not a lot,” lead research Maria Zuber, with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told Discovery News. “It’s certainly not an amount of water that could facilitate human exploration or allow hydrogen mining or that kind of thing.”