Lunar Ice Maps

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

Published research

Danque, H. A., and K. M. Cannon (2024). Lunar Polar Volatile Remobilization in Regolith-Filled Craters. Icarus, 411, 115953.

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

Capabilities

Thermal models for the lunar poles tell us where ice is physically capable of existing, but provide exactly zero information about whether there's actually ice there or not. In theory, we want to know where the ice is, but current remote sensing datasets have serious limitations: most optical instruments can only see the upper microns to tens of microns, and can't distinguish an ice deposit from a surficial frost. Neutron spectroscopy as-flown has extremely coarse spatial resolution, unable to resolve hydrogen signatures in a meaningful way. And radar detections are completely compromised by subsurface rocks and roughness that have the same signature as buried ice.

This line of work has aimed to carve out a middle ground, namely asking "where should there be ice?", given that "where is the ice?" has not produced useful results yet, and "where could there be ice?" is trivial and tells us nothing. This involves physics-based models spanning the entire poles to produce different flavors of an Ice Favorability Index (IFI), which draws on changes in the Moon's spin-axis orientation, thermal conditions, and time-variant ice deposition.

Newer directions have involved identifying a population of small craters in cold traps with unique morphometries, then recently mapping these in a systematic way. Drawing on work from others to re-interpret the LPNS neutron data and identify mismatches between DIVINER data and thermal models, the newest versions of the IFI are more grounded in the remote sensing data and start to point to real signatures of buried ice that can be mapped over the poles.

Adapting it to your work

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