The Indian lander and rover is exploring the Moon’s southern pole. How do the two poles compare? Any reason to think one is a better prospect for ice and other resources than the other?
The North pole is flatter and contains less permanently shadowed regions that are the prime candidates for ice. there have been a few lunar orbiter missions (Lunar Prospector, Chandrarayaan-1) that have detected hydrogen and water molecules. The LCROSS mission deliberately crashed a rocket upper stage near the south pole and detected water in the ejecta.
There is more surface or near-surface frozen water near in permanently shadowed regions the South Pole of the Moon, and there is theorized to be a lot of water distributed on the subsurface of the Moon overall. However, actually extracting and purifying that water is a substantially more difficult than people image. At around 143 K (-130 °C) water is extremely hard (in the physical sense, not chemically ‘hard’), and extracting it by drilling or vibratory methods would be more difficult than breaking granite. In addition, this water is mixed with a lot of silicates and other minerals, making it even tougher to extract; essentially, it would have to be vapor distilled to extract pure water. It would probably literally be easier to capture a water-rich Near Earth Asteroid and use focused solar energy to vaporize it, then process it into propellants or consumable water and sent to the Moon wherever it is needed than it would be to extract large quantities of water from the Lunar surface even before the difficulty of landing at the poles and then transporting water across the lunar surface.
The concentrations of heavier and industrially useful elements, largely brought to the surface of the Moon by meteorite impacts, is mostly in the equatorial to mid-latitude regions. Difficulties with working in the highly abrasive and electrostatic dust make extracting and processing minerals a challenge but this is hypothetically where you would concentrate any kind of industry.
Stranger