Podcaster: Fraser Cain
Title: Guide To Space – Why Is The Moon’s South Pole So Important?
Organization: Universe Today
Link: www.universetoday.com
Description:
As NASA prepares to return to the Moon by 2024 as part of its Artemis program, the agency is focusing its efforts on exploring the Moon’s polar regions. These are areas of the Moon which seem to have a lot of water mixed in with the regolith.
Some of these craters are permanently in shadow, and might still have large quantities of water, that’s accessible to human and robotic explorers. This is a critical resource, and the Moon might be just the place to help humanity as it pushes out to explore the rest of the Solar System.
Blame it on the plants.
In addition to filling the atmosphere with oxygen, plants give off a very specific wavelength visible in infrared radiation. It’s the kind of signal that other civilizations could search for as they’re scanning the galaxy. It’s what we’ll be looking for too. But don’t just blame the plants. Other forms of life have been giving off signals too, signals we can search for as we discover new exoplanets and wonder if they have life there.
Bio: Fraser Cain is the publisher of Universe Today
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365 Days of Astronomy
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