Water on the Moon
There's water on the moon, and we're not just talking about a little sprinkling of interstellar H2O—we're talking about troves and troves of water-ice that could be sitting just beneath the surface, especially at the lunar poles. This water could be harvested to help generate a new form of spacecraft fuel or used to help sustain a future lunar colony.
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How did all that water-ice get there? Nobody really knows yet. Theories range from outgassing reactions that pushed water embedded in the interior out toward the surface, to meteorite impacts and cometary bombardments that delivered the water from outer space, to chemical interactions catalyzed by solar wind. “We just don't know,” says Petro. “And we’d certainly like to find out.”
Moonquakes
There are earthquakes happening on the moon quite frequently—otherwise known as moonquakes. Apollo-era seismometers installed on the surface measured these shakes from 1969 to 1977. That data has shown us that the moon is an active body, a far cry from the stale lifeless rock many assume it is.
We're already aware of a few phenomena that cause these quakes, like thermal expansion, tidal stress induced by Earth's gravity, and meteorite impacts. But with such limited data, we're not entirely sure how these processes work and exactly how the quakes behave. Furthermore, there are other, shallower moonquakes without any obvious cause, which seem to be occurring more recently than the others.
Petro suggests a global seismic network installed around the moon would be tremendously helpful in helping understand the trigger mechanisms behind all this tectonic activity. Such a network could cleanly identify exactly when these events occurred, where they originated from, and the effect they have on the rest of the moon. The 50-year-old data we're using now won't be enough to give us any good answers.