“For me, this is a dream measurement,” says David Paige, a planetary scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles who has been part of the mission since its inception nearly a decade ago. “It’s an opportunity to make a real rapid advancement with such a small spacecraft.” Once the team has mapped out the distribution of surface ice at the South Pole, they can use it to guide future landers, rovers, and eventually humans to places where they can collect frosty samples.
Today’s astronauts are stuck having to pack their water with them. It’s heavy and incompressible, which means it’s expensive to launch and takes up space that could be
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