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Originally published in Science Express on 23 October 2008
Science 7 November 2008:
Vol. 322. no. 5903, pp. 938 - 939
DOI: 10.1126/science.1164020
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Reports

Lack of Exposed Ice Inside Lunar South Pole Shackleton Crater

Junichi Haruyama,1 Makiko Ohtake,1 Tsuneo Matsunaga,2 Tomokatsu Morota,1 Chikatoshi Honda,1 Yasuhiro Yokota,1 Carle M. Pieters,3 Seiichi Hara,4 Kazuyuki Hioki,4 Kazuto Saiki,5 Hideaki Miyamoto,6 Akira Iwasaki,7 Masanao Abe,1 Yoshiko Ogawa,2 Hiroshi Takeda,8 Motomaro Shirao,9 Atsushi Yamaji,10 Jean-Luc Josset11

The inside of Shackleton Crater at the lunar south pole is permanently shadowed; it has been inferred to hold water-ice deposits. The Terrain Camera (TC), a 10-meter-resolution stereo camera onboard the Selenological and Engineering Explorer (SELENE) spacecraft, succeeded in imaging the inside of the crater, which was faintly lit by sunlight scattered from the upper inner wall near the rim. The estimated temperature of the crater floor, based on the crater shape model derived from the TC data, is less than ~90 kelvin, cold enough to hold water-ice. However, at the TC's spatial resolution, the derived albedo indicates that exposed relatively pure water-ice deposits are not on the crater floor. Water-ice may be disseminated and mixed with soil over a small percentage of the area or may not exist at all.

1 Institute of Space and Astronautical Science, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, Sagamihara, Kanagawa 229-85105, Japan.
2 Center for Global Environmental Research, National Institute for Environmental Studies, Tsukuba, Ibaraki 305-8506, Japan.
3 Department of Geological Sciences, Brown University, Providence, RI 02912, USA.
4 NTT DATA CCS Corporation, Koto-ku, Tokyo 136-0071, Japan.
5 Department of Earth and Space Science, Graduate School of Science, Osaka University, Toyonaka, Osaka 560-0043, Japan.
6 University Museum, The University of Tokyo, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo 113-0033, Japan.
7 Department of Aerospace and Astronautics, The University of Tokyo, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo 113-8656, Japan.
8 Forum Research, Chiba Institute of Technology, Narashino, Chiba 275-0016, Japan.
9 Taito-ku, Tokyo 111-0035, Japan.
10 Division of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Kyoto University, Sakyo-ku, Kyoto 606-8502, Japan.
11 Space Exploration Institute, CP 774, CH-2002 Neuchatel, Switzerland.

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