Carbon and Nitrogen May Be Concentrated in Lunar Polar Ice Deposits - but the Research Is Still Ongo

The volatile elements a permanent lunar base would require - carbon, nitrogen, and water - are largely absent from indigenous lunar materials. External delivery mechanisms have been supplying them over billions of years, but not all sources are equal in terms of practical utility. Solar wind and micrometeorite impacts do introduce these elements, but at concentrations too low to make extraction economically viable. The processing costs would far outweigh the yield.

The more promising hypothesis points to the lunar poles. Permanently shadowed craters near the poles maintain temperatures low enough to trap and preserve volatile compounds delivered by comet and asteroid impacts over geological timescales. If carbon and nitrogen have concentrated in polar ice deposits alongside the water ice already confirmed to exist there, the resource picture for a sustained human presence changes significantly. The critical unknowns - the precise extent of those deposits and the quantities of each element they contain - are exactly what the next phase of lunar exploration, including the Artemis programme, is designed to resolve.