Cody's Lab Video on Polar Lunar Craters and Science (Artemis)

A lot of people are asking why we’re bothering to go back to the Moon. The answer so far is that we are going to look for water, at first. There are permanently-shadowed craters that capture water molecules that are created on the moon. There is likely a LOT of water, and it has implications for the cost of doing things in space with people. Lunar water is potentially much cheaper than water shipped from Earth. Lunar water can make rocket fuel in a number of ways.

But Cody in the video below points out something I had not thought of at all: The Earth has been constantly losing a bit of atmosphere per year, and a surprising amount of it would wind up on the Moon because the solar wind will drive it towards the moon when the Earth is between it and the Sun.

That means those craters could possibly contain a frozen record of the evolution of Earth’s atmosphere, major events like volcanos, asteroids, or mass die-offs, precise CO2 concentrations, etc. Maybe even ancient viruses. It would fall into those craters in small amounts, but it would never come out and eventually it would accumulate into layers just like rock layers on Earth, only in frozen gas.

This is speculative, but solid enough that we should really go and see if all that information really is there before we start harvesting. Like an ice core sample on Earth, except going back 4 billion years, perfectly preserved.

Think about what we could learn from that about so many things. You could also have a record of the composition of dust and stuff that fell from space, giving us rock layers of asteroid impacts and regolith preserving all kinds of information about even things like the density and composition of gas clouds our solar system has passed through over time. Just a trove of information.

Just as long as we don’t have to deal with those rock-creatures that killed the crew of Apollo 18.