Open University partners NASA for lunar instrument
15 Jul 2019
Open University scientists are working with NASA on a device that will detect water patterns for future missions to the moon.
Along with NASA’s Goddard Spaceflight Centre and the European Space Agency, OU will develop an instrument, called PITMS, to monitor the moon’s thin atmosphere and investigate the concept of a natural water cycle.
The university hopes PITMS – which will be carried to the moon in 2021 by a commercially provided lander – will provide insight into the movement of water and ultimately help harvest lunar water to support human exploration on the moon.
Senior research fellow at the OU’s School of Physical Sciences Dr Simeon Barber said: “There is increasing evidence from orbiting probes that water may migrate away from equatorial regions, as visited during the Apollo era, driven by extreme day to night temperature cycles, until it becomes tightly ‘trapped’ at permanent cold polar locations.
“The science we achieve, in particular on the availability of accessible water and oxygen, could help the international community to formulate new ways to explore the moon and space in a more sustainable manner by using these off-planet resources,” Dr Barber said.
The OU has conducted research into water on the moon in the last 10 years by analysing rocks returned to Earth from Apollo missions in the 1960s and 1970s. New techniques have found higher concentrations of water than the original investigations.
The project comes under NASA’s Artemis programme, which aims to send astronauts – including the first woman on the moon – to the moon’s south pole by 2024.
The university said it is collaborating with UK, European, US and Russian lunar projects and is also in discussions with Chinese “space players”.
