China is set to launch its Chang’e-7 unmanned, robotic space mission, possibly as early as Monday morning, to look for ice water in the permanently shadowed craters of the moon’s south pole. This marks China’s seventh and most ambitious moon mission so far. Here is what we know about it.
The Chang’e‑7 launch window runs from Monday, August 24 to Monday, August 31, according to launch observers. That means the mission could lift off on any day in that period. The Chang’e-7 comprises an orbiter, a lander, a rover and a hopper.
Over the past two decades, several space missions have established that there is water on the moon. Since the 1960s, even before the first Apollo landing in 1969, scientists speculated that water could exist on the moon. However, when Apollo crews returned samples for testing in the late 1960s and early 1970s, they appeared to be dry.
Finally, in 2009, NASA deliberately crashed a rocket segment and its probe into a shadowed lunar crater to analyse the dust plume it kicked up. This provided one of the clearest direct confirmations that significant ice water does exist on the moon, building on earlier detections of water and hydrogen by probes. In October 2020, NASA scientists announced that water on the moon is more widespread than previously known.
They said water molecules had been found to be encapsulated within mineral grains on the lunar surface and speculated that more water is hidden in ice patches which are in permanent shadows. NASA describes these permanent shadows as dark areas inside deep craters near the north and south poles of the moon where sunlight has not reached for millions or even billions of years. In 2018, prior to confirming it in 2020, NASA had detected water ice in shadowed parts of the moon through mapping.
Expanding knowledge about water on the moon is vital because ancient polar ice may have preserved a record of lunar volcanic activity and of water delivered by comets and asteroids to the Earth-moon system, offering clues to how our own oceans originally formed. Additionally, if there is enough water on the moon that is realistically accessible, it could serve as a source of drinking water for crewed lunar missions, and could also help to keep equipment cool. Hydrogen could also be extracted from moon water to provide fuel, while oxygen could be extracted to breathe, supporting onward missions to Mars or lunar mining.
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