中国任务旨在探测月球隐藏的水

China mission aims to probe the Moon’s hidden water Chang’e-7 will send a hopping craft into a polar crater to directly sample lunar ice DENNIS NORMILE Over decades, lunar orbiters have amassed evidence that the Moon’s polar craters hold stores of water, locked up as ice. But no mission has directly sampled these frozen deposits to determine how much ice is there, how it is distributed, or how it got there in the first place. As early as next week, China will launch Chang’e-7, a robotic mission designed to address those questions by sending a thruster-powered “hopping” probe into a crater near the lunar south pole, among the coldest, darkest places in the Solar System. …