<\/p>\n The goal of the gathering in Honolulu, Hawaii is to help prepare for an onslaught of upcoming robotic and crewed expeditions by multiple nations to explore for, investigate and ultimately utilize lunar polar volatiles. This seminal meeting, the 2nd Lunar Polar Volatiles Conference<\/a>, will take place Nov. 12-14 and invite attendees from throughout U.S. academia, and will also include presentations from China, Canada, and a number of private space companies.<\/p>\n You may like<\/p>\n What’s missing?<\/p>\n “I think there are at least three aspects regarding lunar polar volatiles that we are missing,” said conference organizer, Shuai Li of the Hawaii Institute of Geophysics and Planetology, University of Hawaii at Manoa.<\/p>\n First is the need for a comprehensive survey of major volatiles possibly present in the lunar permanently shadowed regions<\/a>, or PSRs. That survey is critical and missing, Li told Space.com.<\/p>\n \n Nine candidate landing regions for NASA’s Artemis III mission The background image of the lunar South Pole terrain within the nine regions is a mosaic of LRO (Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter) WAC (Wide Angle Camera) images. (Image credit: NASA)<\/p>\n “For instance, water ice could be the most abundant volatile but we still have no robust mapping of it, particularly at many regions that may only harbor a few weight percent, or even less water ice,” said Li. Other notable volatile species such as hydrogen sulfide, carbon monoxide or carbon dioxide could be much lower abundance than water ice.<\/p>\n “We do not have direct observations of such volatile species,” Li said.<\/p>\n Secondly, there is a lack of knowledge on how volatiles distribute vertically, including water ice.<\/p>\n And thirdly, said Li, is the need for sampling of those volatiles to understand their origins and how they formed and sequestered on the moon.<\/p>\n Just getting started<\/p>\n Norbert Sch\u00f6rghofer, senior scientist at the Planetary Science Institute and resident in Honolulu, Hawaii, is a co-organizer of the upcoming gathering.<\/p>\n You may like<\/p>\n “In my view, the field of ‘lunar polar volatiles’ is just getting started,” said Sch\u00f6rghofer. Many missions, such as the recently reinstated<\/a> Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover, or VIPER, have been delayed, “and we don’t have nearly enough data to assess the abundance and distribution of water ice on the moon,” he told Space.com.<\/p>\n Most importantly we need definitive proof of ice on the moon<\/a>, Sch\u00f6rghofer said.<\/p>\n Wanted: definitive and reproducible evidence<\/p>\n Back in October 2009, NASA’s Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS<\/a>), was purposely put on a “slam dunk” trajectory to confirm the presence of water ice in a permanently shadowed crater at the lunar south pole.<\/p>\n “LCROSS measured six percent, but that’s not a lot of ice and it was a single-shot experiment,” said Sch\u00f6rghofer. “And the spectroscopic detections of ice exposed on the surface from lunar orbiters are hopelessly incoherent. We need definitive and reproducible evidence,” he told Space.com.<\/p>\n Sch\u00f6rghofer observed that there has been major progress regarding water inside of rocks, based on the return samples from China’s Chang’e-5 and Chang’e-6 near side and far side missions.<\/p>\n \n (Image credit: CNSA\/CLEP)<\/p>\n “However, there has been shockingly little progress about ice, due to the lack of landed missions to the polar regions. Scientists are trying to tease out information about ice from data that were collected for other reasons, from instruments that were never designed to detect lunar volatiles, so we ended up with a lot of ‘maybe’ observations,” said Sch\u00f6rghofer.<\/p>\n![\"Nine](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/DGn9UpDzxPQdQndavWy7ES.jpg\")
\n<\/p>\n![\"An](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/hKkYBSEGVTK7bDgK2ukXdT.jpg\")
\n<\/p>\n
![\"An](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/7QRp3aSc9KMsiwUcAoYJT6.jpg\")
\n<\/p>\n