Scientists are embarking on a two-year project to turn the data acquired by the Lunar Prospector into a detailed series of global maps of the moon's surface composition, polar water ice deposits and magnetic fields.
Alan Binder, the mission's principal investigator and director of the Lunar Research Institute in Tucson, Arizona, said the $3 million, two-year task could help point the way for future commercial exploitation of the moon.
"This is the Lunar Prospector, so we were looking for resources," Binder said.
The Lunar Research Institute, a private, nonprofit corporation founded by Binder, will direct the NASA-funded mapping project.
The bulk of the work will involve the production of maps showing the surface distribution of 10 elements, including oxygen, iron, titanium and aluminum -- natural resources that could be mined for use by a lunar colony or "exported" to Earth.
The contour maps will cover 100 percent of the moon's surface, and will have a resolution varying from 37 miles (60 kilometers) to 93 miles (150 kilometers) for the various elements. For the distribution of water ice, the resolution could be as good as 12 miles (20 kilometers).
According to Binder, these maps will also relate the distribution of three trace elements -- uranium, thorium and potassium. Like the use of radioactive elements in medicine to locate or track the growth of, say, cancerous tumors in a human, the distribution of the three will provide insight into the moon's past geological history.
"We have three tracers to understand the processes that shaped the moon," Binder said.
Paul Spudis, a staff scientist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, said the Prospector data would go hand in hand with the maps now being made from information gleaned by the 1994 Clementine lunar mission.
Clementine, a joint Department of Defense-NASA mission, spent 71 days orbiting the moon, capturing 11-color multi-spectral data and laser-ranging altimetry data.
Prospector will yield maps of how various elements are distributed across the moon's surface; Clementine will do the same for various minerals.
"It's very much complementary," Spudis said.
Although Prospector also mapped the moon's magnetic fields, the grant will not cover the costs of completing those maps, Binder said.
Lunar Prospector was launched in January 1998 on a 19-month mission to map the Earth's moon once every 14 days.
The $65 million mission ended last July 31 when the satellite was crashed purposely into a crater near the moon's south pole where large amounts of hydrogen -- and presumably water ice -- had been detected.
Scientists had hoped the daredevil impact would raise a plume of water vapor from the ice that could be measured from Earth and by space-based telescopes, including Hubble.
However, no vapor was detected by the long-shot experiment, a result that does not rule out the possibility that large amounts of water ice exist on the satellite's surface, Binder said.
Although the Russians and Americans have mapped the moon, including the latter's early Ranger and Lunar Orbiter missions, much study of Earth's lone natural satellite remains to be done.
For example, data acquired by the Lunar Orbiter 1 in 1966 remains some of the best global mapping imagery available of the moon, Spudis said. "We need to systematically map the moon with a mapping camera."
The Japanese plan to map the moon as part of their SELENE (Selenological and Engineering Explorer) mission, slated for launch in 2003.
Currently, NASA has no immediate plans to return to the moon.
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