Chapter 291 - 284 Ice_1

December 17, 7:00 PM.

A thousand meters above the Lunar South Pole, one of the three landers of the Chang’e-5 mission was continuously adjusting its engine nozzles, rapidly reducing altitude.

Enclosed within it were two large spiders purchased by the space agency, destined for the Kuom Impact Crater, situated 430 kilometers from the landing site of the Chang’e 4 mission, still within the Aitken Basin.

After receiving the Explorer 2 base platform provided by New Yuan, the space agency added a considerable amount of scientific research equipment. The functions of the two Yutu-3s were not identical and could assist each other in operations.

To differentiate them, they were named Yutu-3A and Yutu-3B. These two robots, nearly half a ton each and highly self-sufficient, were extremely cherished by the space agency, treated like treasures.

New Yuan’s two landers had landed at the predetermined location four hours earlier, and for added precaution, they took several extra orbits and used the "Laurel" resource exploration satellite for auxiliary positioning before beginning the landing procedure.

As usual, the landing process was being broadcast live. Although the space agency had already conducted numerous Moon landing missions, the 5.8-ton lander still caused anxiety. There was a lot of equipment on board!

The operators confirmed the landing procedure was correct multiple times, and the lander’s descent attitude was also fairly stable, everything seemed normal.

The altitude decreased gradually from 1000 meters to 500 meters, to 300 meters. The lander’s 20KN variable thrust hydrogen-oxygen engine began to increase power gradually, and the sharp-eyed staff could even see the lunar dust being blown up from the Moon’s surface.

Wait, something seemed off.

Did they just see a bit of dark reflection?

But before having time to confirm, the lander had already descended to around 10 meters. The powerful flames blew away the lunar dust on the surface, revealing an unusually different object beneath.

The lander’s landing program was still unaware of any issues, the sensors reported everything as normal, with a fuel surplus of 15%. Therefore, the throttle valve pushed to 50% one last time, maintaining for about 1 second, and then the lander was set to land smoothly.

Some people in mission control had already stood up, but the operators could do nothing. The signal delay for the engine to respond was at least five seconds, leaving no time to react.

Common people watching the live broadcast through television and the internet still didn’t understand what was wrong, but in front of the computer of an employee from the European Space Agency who was slacking off watching the retransmission, a participant in a small asteroid detection project stood up abruptly.

"Water! Ice layer!"

At the Kuom Impact Crater, the last meter of the lander’s descent was maintained for just over a second under the influence of the engine’s one-ton thrust. The exposed ice layer below was subjected to high-temperature scorching, melting, and vaporization. The camera at the bottom of the lander was engulfed by a burst of boiling steam.

Seconds later, the live broadcast showed this mishap, and now everyone knew there had been an accident. However, once the boiling steam dissipated, it immediately turned into ice crystals in the vacuum’s low temperatures, and the 20KN variable thrust engine had already shut down.

The lander’s support legs hit the ice layer and slid a slight distance due to a slight incline caused by the engine flare’s pit, but this did not affect operation. The landing procedure thought all was well and sent a standby signal to the Magpie Bridge relay satellite, which then forwarded it to Earth.

What they didn’t know was that the control center for the Chang’e-5 mission had already changed from a serious atmosphere to one of agitation.

...

"What? An ice layer? The Chinese have discovered an ice layer!"

Claire hung up the phone and opened her smartphone; the trending news on Twitter had already changed to "Yutu-3A has found ice on the Moon."

Time rewound to three hours earlier.

The person present at the Chang’e 5 Ground Control Center back then was Shen Zuozhou, who had just returned from a space training session a few days ago. He had two speculations in his mind at the time:

Either the lander had had the dumb luck to touch down on a spot where a thin layer of moon soil covered a part of the fabled Lunar South Pole ice layer that was exposed, or it had encountered fragments formed by an ice meteorite that had landed on the Moon.

If it were the former, then this place could be chosen as the construction site for the Moon Base.

He immediately gave the order to release the Yutu-3A and Yutu-3B robots to random drilling within a 1-kilometer radius. The lander’s stationary sampling equipment could drill down 5 meters and was to begin work straight away.

The lander’s stationary analysis would take some time, with results only available after the live broadcast ended, but this was already irrelevant.

Because when Yutu-3B leaped out, going in the opposite direction of Yutu-3A, its eight legs penetrated less than 10 centimeters thick moon soil, abnormally sliding due to the low friction from the ice layer. Its travel AI went crazy with warnings, but fortunately, it stabilized its posture through the eight nimble spider legs and continued moving forward.

Over a total distance of 100 meters, almost every step touched the ice layer, and finally, Yutu-3B stopped at a high ground, forcibly dug down with its two front legs, creating a shallow pit nearly 30 centimeters deep, which still revealed murky ice underneath.

Half an hour after the lander touched down, they had not carried out the usual procedures of taking mutual photographs and planting flags. Under Shen Zuozhou’s command, they crazily dug holes everywhere instead.

The two Yutu-3 robots each advanced over a hundred meters, and at 5 out of 6 random points, found ice less than 40cm beneath the lunar surface.

The lander’s drill also reached its limit, the whole 5-meter depth was ice.

Shen Zuozhou immediately made an estimate in his heart, hey, even if it were just the already explored circular area of more than a hundred meters in diameter, if all of it contained ice layers 5 meters thick, that would be about 200,000 tons of ice!

200,000 tons of ice, if hydrogen and oxygen were produced by electrolysis, that would yield 20,000 tons of hydrogen and 180,000 tons of oxygen!

A lunar surface base was possible!

At this moment, most people watching the live stream just felt it odd, wondering why the two Yutu robots jumped so far instead of following the prearranged procedures, and the command center seemed to be in a bit of a mess, until the broadcast ended.

However, a considerable number of industry insiders also watched the live stream. An employee of the European Space Agency was the first to post news that the Kuom Impact Crater might have been created by an ice meteorite impact, or part of the lunar ice layer was exposed due to a meteorite impact.

Regardless of which case it was, with a diameter of approximately 4.3 kilometers for the Kuom Impact Crater, it was estimated that there would be at least 8.7 million tons of ice, enough to meet the fuel and living needs of a large lunar base.

This speculative article, coupled with the anomalies in the space agency’s live broadcast, immediately caused a huge stir in the space industry. Although in recent years there has been a variety of indirect evidence suggesting a large layer of ice on the lunar surface, there had never been a definitive discovery.

However, the Chang’e 5 mission had discovered such a large layer of ice. Didn’t this mean that a Moon Base could soon become a reality?

Ice could be directly used to produce oxygen and hydrogen, and with so many inorganic materials in the moon soil, it wasn’t impossible to produce methane and ammonia, fully capable of supporting a base!

While the outside world began to ferment with speculation, the Aerospace Development Committee finally released a message three hours later:

"The Chang’e 5 No. 1 lander has possibly discovered ice crystals at the Kuom Impact Crater in the Aitken Basin at the Lunar South Pole. Chinese scientists are organizing further analysis activities."