Sorry everyone,

It’s my first time posting here.

The last post I used the same title as CTV, and I agree it appears to be sensationalized for something that is not yet an active mission.

I was allowed to repost with a revised title and hopefully we can continue our discussions

Special thanks to mod SpartanJack17 for allowing me to post with a revised title.

My apologies everyone. I wasn’t sure if I was allowed to change the title from the default article’s previously, so that’s why I kept it as is at the time.

I don't trust an article that uses the nonsense term, "dark side" of the Moon.

Even by the very, very low standards of Canadian science reporting, this is a badly written article. Here's some actual, useful information about the mission:

• The rover would be the first to carry a neutron spectrometer to the south polar region, which will be able to detect hydrogen (in or out of water molecules) and do some basic mineralogy of the surface
• Hydrogen detection would be followed up with UV analysis (a first for a surface mission)
• Do some good old proper rock-sniffing (mineral detection) with a space Christmas tree array of coloured LEDs (sincere apologies to r/fuckyourheadlights)
• Work on its polar tan, Canadian-style (while keeping track of the radiation dose it receives from UV, cosmic rays and the like)
• The one instrument with a proper French name (LAFORGE) comes from... Maryland, namely the Pentagon's research arm Applied Physics Lab at Johns Hopkins. This will be a sort of thermal sensor that will give the rover night vision and allow it to determine the stability and consistency of the surfaces it will be driving on.

The last rover to land, Chang'e 4, carried a similar neutron spectrometer and radiation detector, but the other instruments are fairly new to Lunar surface science, and this mission could prove very useful if successful (the same set of instruments would work well on comets, or the poles of Mercury, for example).

There does seem to be ice water on the Moon...and knowing us, we'll suck it all up and then bemoan the fact that it's all gone a century from now. Which will cause an existential crisis for Moon bases that were relying on it.

Is there any chatter about protecting this probably non-renewable resource from rapacious consumption?

Somewhere, Robert Heinlein is smiling (you might really like The Moon is a Harsh Mistress).

Seriously though, who is going to be extracting the water just to remove it from Luna? I'm pretty sure that water/resource recycling is going to be a huge focus once the basic surface infrastructure is in place, more so than aboard the ISS. Even if one or two human crew operations are being stupid with it, there is a fair bit of the stuff (considering), it's not going to disappear that quickly.

Canadian here. If I can sniff out an LCBO in the middle of nowhere at -30 C in a blizzard, I'm sure our best and brightest can find a cold drink on the far side of the moon.

You do understand that the "dark ages" were not literally devoid of light, yes? Dark has quite a few definitions and it's use in this context is appropriate.

I loved The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, and I expect a focus on recycling for any Moon base, but people are talking about making rocket fuel out of it, and that's definitely a one-shot use. Honestly, you can't make this stuff up 🤦‍♂️

>people are talking about making rocket fuel out of it

Fair point. It's actually the carbon (as CO2) that worries me in that case - hydrogen should be replenished (albeit very, very slowly), but the carbon is probably from comets, making it acutely precious on Luna. Some have been concerned with preserving the purity of the ice, but you may be right - we can't entirely bootstrap the exploration of the solar system with such a limited resource.

>we can't entirely bootstrap the exploration of the solar system with such a limited resource

I doubt we can even bootstrap a Moon base, to be honest. Unless a method to extract necessary resources from solar power and cracking rocks is baked into the initial build, we'll burn through the ice and then flap our arms about in alarm when it starts to run out...then spend a fortune in a rush job to implement the resource extraction at the last minute 🤦‍♂️