Author: Kate Alexander

Peary Station was the first permanently occupied base at the Lunar north pole, and the scientists there keep busy looking up and down at the same time.  Peary Crater was chosen because it’s the oldest, largest crater near the pole, making it perfect for the study of deep ice cores to reveal the solar system’s…

The satellites had a few new sites lined up for us based on [tooltip term=”polarization” tip=”Ice is transparent to radar at a wavelength of 12.6 cm, and imperfections in the ice can scatter the radar in a way that hard, rocky, reflective surfaces will not. The circular polarization ratio can indicate the presence of water…

I can tell the First Crew had an easy time of it. The top meter of the surface, here, is 0.8% ice (by mass), 0.9% in some places. We can mine this down to 0.1%, below which it’s usually not worth it. We keep our methods as simple as possible, many borrowed from mining on…