Two US spacecraft launched today from Florida’s Cape Canaveral, bound for the Moon’s south pole to search for water. The missions could provide a resource for future lunar exploration and could have significant implications for NASA’s plans to send astronauts to this region.
NASA’s Lunar Trailblazer will create high-resolution maps of water on the Moon, while Intuitive Machines’ commercial lander, Athena, aims to drill into the soil to collect samples. The lander is expected to touch down on March 6 and will use a robot drill called TRIDENT to penetrate up to one metre deep in search of signs of water.
Finding water on the Moon has significant implications for future lunar exploration. It could provide a resource for rocket fuel at Moon bases, which would support expanded exploration missions. The Indian mission Chandrayaan-2 and a Korean probe are also searching for water on the Moon, with the latter carrying a NASA instrument to study ice-rich craters.
The two new spacecraft “are going after really important pieces of that puzzle”, said Parvathy Prem, a planetary scientist at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. The success of these missions will provide critical data on how lunar soils behave and help scientists better understand where water exists on the Moon.
Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00597-z