By Paul Gorman
Australian-based astrophysicist Dr Beatrice Jones is modelling the Moon’s subsurface water-ice deposits ahead of planned astronaut-led missions from there to Mars in the second half of the century.
At October’s International Astronautical Congress in Sydney, Jones presented findings using Seequent’s Leapfrog and Oasis montaj to build four-dimensional models of lunar water-ice resources discovered 16 years ago.
Her work is at an early exploratory stage and involves modelling existing data.
Moon water is critical for travel to Mars, with spacecraft likely to be fuelled by hydrogen and oxygen separated from mined lunar water-ice.
This water will also be critical in producing oxygen for life support and providing drinking water for astronauts, helping enable a sustainable staging post on the Moon by 2040-45.
‘Water is the oil of space’, she says.
Developing 3D models to test possible scenarios
The Moon has no visible pools of liquid water. But exploration from the 2000s has revealed the polar regions’ water-ice.
In January, Jones set up Wonderspace to apply her expertise in frontier exploration, basin evolution, and fluids modelling to solve challenges of carbon storage, natural hydrogen, and geothermal energy.
Quantifying the Moon’s water-ice occupies most of her time and she is driven to influence the acquisition of subsurface regolith data to advance her work and get closer to extracting water on the Moon.
Her focus is a 250 sq km area close to the Moon’s south pole, where the Shoemaker, Faustini, and Haworth craters have a high indication of water-equivalent hydrogen, based on neutron spectroscopy data.
‘We need to know where the sweet spot is, with the highest concentrations. We know there’s hydrogen molecules there, and we can assume that it’s water, given it’s been validated with infra-red telescope and spectroscopy instrumentation.’
Only one 1m-deep probe – from Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost robot which landed in March this year – has provided recent, but still limited, depth data. Other data Jones works with represent only the surface to just centimetres down.
At the recent Sydney congress, Jones met global companies and space experts, and encouraged them to acquire more subsurface data, and where she thinks we have the greatest chance of discovering the water.
‘I believe as we model the data we have, and eventually drill more probes, we will become pleasantly surprised that there’s water deeper down, frozen in stratigraphic layers.
‘The surface of the Moon is billions of years old, and although it gets disrupted by meteorite impacts, as we examine crater morphology using gravity and seismic data we believe there is layered regolith, and I suspect that will have water in it too, even down to 10m depth, and will be significant.’
Jones studied astrophysics at Victoria University of Wellington in her undergraduate science degree and completed her PhD at GNS Science, now part of Earth Sciences New Zealand.
Integrating multidisciplinary data
Her interest in space was inspired by Polish physicist and chemist Marie Curie, along with New Zealand’s own Beatrice Tinsley, the first woman professor of astronomy at Yale University, and Nobel Prize-winning Ernest Rutherford.
‘I’ve probably been fascinated with science and astronomy since I can remember and enjoy being an amateur astronomer. I was always fascinated with early scientists and even with the history of the telescope, dating back to the 1600s.’
Jones says when she started the work in January she needed software that could deal with the lunar environment.
‘I’d heard that Leapfrog was a surface-to-subsurface utility modelling tool, so I thought it would be perfect. And I also heard that Leapfrog was very intuitive to use, with a user- interface made for a geoscientist’s thinking.
‘I’ve got some nice preliminary models – a geological model and a geostatistical model. With Leapfrog I can build the regolith layers that I believe exist, from scientific literature, and understand the depth-composition variation where the water is likely to be.
‘With depth we get changes in regolith density, temperature and other burial conditions. So, in Leapfrog I can use geostatistical tools to interpolate the shallow data, to produce a depth function to predict the regolith behaviour at depth. That’s another plus, being able to trial different geostatistical modelling algorithms within the layers.’
Jones says as the Moon becomes more accessible, there are people on Earth training to go to Mars on a ‘one-way ticket’.
‘Not to visit but to stay, like on the International Space Station.’
Would she like to go to the Moon or somewhere else in space?
‘Yes! It would be great – and good to get out beyond our planet to see back towards Earth.’
Australian-based astrophysicist Dr Beatrice Jones is modelling the Moon’s subsurface water-ice deposits ahead of planned astronaut-led missions from there to Mars
Researchers around the world are advancing our understanding of the subsurface using Seequent software. Licences are available for those carrying out detailed subsurface research and for classroom teaching and learning in the geosciences.