Lunar Ice Deposition

This work is of interest for organizations focused on identifying, characterizing, and mining water ice and other volatiles from the lunar poles.

Published research

Cannon, K. M., and D. T. Britt (2020). A Geologic Model for Lunar Ice Deposits at Mining Scales. Icarus, 347, 113778.

Cannon, K. M., A. N. Deutsch, J. W. Head, and D. T. Britt (2020). Stratigraphy of Ice and Ejecta Deposits at the Lunar Poles. Geophysical Research Letters, 47, e2020GL088920.

Cannon, K. M., and A. N. Deutsch (2023). Revisiting Ice Stratigraphies at the Lunar Poles. Lunar and Planetary Science Conference LIV, Abstract #1259.

Cannon, K. M. (2024). Descriptive and Genetic Models for Lunar Ice Deposits Consistent with Current Remote Sensing Data. Space Resources Roundtable XXIV.

Capabilities

At its core, the work involves physics-based 3D Monte Carlo simulations of the full stratigraphy of ice and dry regolith within the polar areas. It can be tuned to operate at different scales, from smaller local patches, mid-sized cold traps, to an entire pole. The models include realistic production-function crater sampling, ejecta blankets, Maxwellian impact velocities with a piecewise volatile-retention curve, impact gardening, and topographic creep.

Outputs include grade-probability tables by depth interval ("X% chance of 0–5 wt% ice in the upper 10 cm"), exceedance curves, depth-to-first-ice maps, and drill-strip logs. Reported as probabilities per prospecting-scale column, with within-run spatial variability and run-to-run uncertainty kept separate.

Five continuous constraint metrics are applied to the simulation ensemble results, anchored on a forward-modeled neutron observable (in-PSR water-equivalent hydrogen over the top meter, gated to published 0.5–4 wt% amounts).

A Bayesian layer re-weights the existing ensembles against incoming observations by importance sampling. For example, with newly collected, higher-resolution neutron spectrometer data, you can get posterior reserve tables and a posterior over deposition onset.

Adapting it to your work

Get in touch and we will scope something that fits.