Then in 1961, the geophysicist Kenneth Watson of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory theorized that ice could persist inside PSRs. However, Urey believed that any ice in these sunless locations would have been “rapidly lost” because of the moon’s lack of atmosphere. This means the sun’s rays strike its poles nearly horizontally, and the rims of polar craters will block light from directly reaching their depths. He observed that, whereas Earth orbits the sun with its rotational axis tilted by 23.5 degrees, the moon orbits at a mere 1.5-degree tilt.
“Near its poles there may be depressions on which the sun never shines,” he wrote. Speculation about PSRs dates back to 1952, when the American chemist Harold Urey first hypothesized their existence on the moon. “That’s the coolest thing.” Water, Water, Everywhere “I don’t know what we’re going to see,” said Robinson, the lead scientist for next year’s robotic mission. What will we find lurking in the shadows? On the eve of this new era of moon landings, a slew of fresh studies of PSRs have revealed that these shadowed regions are even stranger than scientists imagined. By the decade’s end, NASA plans to send humans to explore in person. Next year, robotic vehicles will enter the bewildering icy depths of PSRs for the first time, revealing what the interiors of these shadowed craters look like.
Studies so far have provided a tantalizing glimpse at best. It could also be a resource for future human activities on the moon. Studying the ice’s chemical composition should reveal how it was delivered to the moon, in turn illuminating the origin of water on Earth, or indeed any rocky world around any star. This means ice on or below the lunar surface in PSRs won’t necessarily melt instead it might have survived there for billions of years. “Some PSRs are colder than the surface of Pluto,” said Parvathy Prem, a planetary scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland. Inside, temperatures can drop below minus 170 degrees Celsius. PSRs are of immense interest to scientists. “They’re in permanent darkness,” said Valentin Bickel, a planetary scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Germany. These are craters like Cabeus into which the sun can’t reach, because of the geometry of the moon’s orbit. Most of this ice resides in peculiar features at the moon’s poles called permanently shadowed regions (PSRs). Scientists now think there’s not just a bit of water ice on the moon there are 6 trillion kilograms of it. Yet about 25 years ago, spacecraft began to detect signatures of hydrogen around the moon’s poles, hinting that water might be trapped there as ice. Its lack of atmosphere and extreme temperatures should cause any water to almost instantly evaporate. “It’s really weird when you stop to think about it,” said Mark Robinson, a planetary scientist at Arizona State University. All rights reserved.The moon isn’t an obvious reservoir of water. It also included such enduring songs as “Breathe (In the Air),” “Time,” “Us and Them,” “Brain Damage” and “Eclipse.”Ĭopyright © 2022, ABC Audio. The album featured the band’s first top-40 hit in the U.S., “Money,” which peaked at #15 on the Billboard Hot 100. The album has gone one to be certified 15-times Platinum by the RIAA for sales of over 15 million copies in the U.S. Released on March 1, 1973, The Dark Side of the Moon was Pink Floyd’s eighth studio album and its first to top the Billboard 200. Powell also comments about the iconic album cover, which he and Thorgerson designed, “ still seems to stand the test of time, which is wonderful. He adds, “t the moment, it’s looking very positive to a great year of celebration of Dark Side of the Moon next year. And, you know, if it all comes off, great. While Powell doesn’t share specific details about the project, he explains, “We’re planning to do a lot of things, is all I can say. Most recently, Po created the updated cover of the 2022 reissue of the band’s 1977 record, Animals, and he tells ABC Audio he’s now working on a new project marking The Dark Side of the Moon‘s 50th anniversary. Next year marks the 50th anniversary of Pink Floyd‘s landmark 1973 album, The Dark Side of the Moon, and according to Aubrey “Po” Powell, who helped create many of the band’s album covers, big plans are in the works to celebrate the milestone.Īlong with the late Storm Thorgerson, Powell co-founded the English graphic-design firm Hipgnosis, which began collaborating with Pink Floyd on the band’s second album, 1968’s A Saucerful of Secrets.
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