Presence of water on moon pathbreaking discovery: Madhavan Nair

Describing the recent discovery of thick ice deposits on the Moon as 'path breaking', former ISRO chairman G Madhavan Nair said it opens up a very vast avenue for human exploration."This is the first time NASA and ISRO have confirmed the availablity of water on the moon.Huge ice sheets were found inthe polar regions of the moon. This is a path breaking findingas it was earlier believed there was a vaccum in the moon," DrNair, during whose tenure unmanned lunar mission Chandrayaan I was launched, said.  "The presence of water gives many ideas.Water can be split with sunlight to get Oxygen and Hydrogen.While oxygen can be used by human explorers,hydrogen can be used as fuel either to generate electricity or use as rocket fuel for the return journey or even attempt a Mars mission from the Moon,"he said.This also reduces the need to cary expensive oxygen and fuel payloads by future space missions, he said, addressing theFedbank Hormis Memorial Foundation lecture on 'Technologicalchallenges for National Development' here last night.The cost of access to the moon works out to about 50000 USD a kg and to go round the earth it is 20,000 USD a kg.Recently, US had to cancel lunar exploration programmes due to the high cost, he said.Nair said scientists have to find evolve new technologies to reduce access to space by making less expensive rocket systems and to use re-useable rocket systems.A host of new systems and materials need to be developed, he said adding by 2020, theaim was to reduce the cost of launch by half by adopting newertechnologies.