Aldrin, who is an advisor to LunaCorp, will play a big role in future campaigns for the partnership. He said the company hopes to raise it from corporate sponsors, television deals, website fees, ticket sales at science centers and from the government. LunaCorp has already built and tested a prototype rover called the Nomad. The rover was developed by Dr. Red Whittaker, chief scientist of the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. The rover will operate off solar panels when it is traveling in sunlit areas and batteries when it is in shadow.
Scientists believe that any ice on the moon probably came from comets.
In sunlit areas the water would be cooked immediately, vaporizing into space. But the perpetually dark craters at the moon s poles just might trap water molecules in a deep freeze. Data from NASA's Lunar Prospector spacecraft, an orbiter that was launched in January 1998, showed strong evidence of ice at the lunar poles. After gathering global-mapping data for nearly 19 months, the probe ended its mission in July 1999 with a controlled crash into a polar lunar crater. Scientists hoped the crash would send chunks of ice high enough above the moon that they could be seen by powerful telescopes on Earth, but no such effect was detected.