|Home | Stars | Orbits | Habitability | Life || || System
Summary | Rocky Inner Planets | Main Asteroid Belt | Gas Giants
| E-K Belt & Dust Disk | Oort Cloud || || Sol | Mercury | Venus
| Earth | Mars | Jupiter | Saturn | Uranus | Neptune | Dwarf
Planets | Sol b? || On June 20, 2012, astronomers working new
with observational data from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter
(LRO) spacecraft announced that water ice may make up as much as
22 percent of the surface material in Shackleton Crater at the
Moon's South Pole. The spacecraft used a laser to illuminate the
crater's interior and measure its albedo (natural reflectance),
revealing that Schackleton is brighter than other Lunar craters,
which is consistent with the presence of ice. As the crater is
two miles deep and more than 12 miles wide, the small tilt of
the Lunar spin axis keeps the crater's interior permanently dark
and therefore extremely cold, which would allow ice to persist
(NASA news release and Science News). The third planet from the
Sun, Earth,