The moon's oldest and darkest craters could be hiding the most water ice. That's good news for future astronauts

space.com Apr 14, 2026

The moon’s oldest and darkest craters could be hiding the most water ice. That’s good news for future astronauts

Curated by Shubham · TechCapsules · Apr 14, 2026

AI-summarised brief · reviewed before publication

Scientists have discovered that water ice on the moon's surface may have accumulated gradually over billions of years, rather than in a single event. Research suggests that permanently shadowed craters at the lunar south pole, previously thought to be consistently cold, have experienced changes in illumination due to the moon's tilt. This finding is significant for future lunar missions, where water ice could provide a vital resource for astronauts.

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Satellite AI Inference Clears Orbit: Gemma 3 Ran Aboard YAM-9 in April

Loft Orbital's YAM-9 spacecraft successfully demonstrated the first publicly disclosed execution of a vision-language model in orbit. Aboard the spacecraft, Google DeepMind's Gemma 3 performed natural language queries, classified Earth imagery, and produced plain-English summaries without transmitting raw pixels to the ground. This achievement marks a significant shift in the value layer of Earth observation, moving from ground-based processing to onboard inference capabilities. The model, running on an Nvidia Jetson Orin AGX graphics processing unit, utilized a software harness developed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory to fit within the spacecraft's memory budget and processing constraints.

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‘Best. Mars. Mission. Ever.’ Scientists hail MAVEN’s legacy as NASA retires Red…

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spacenews.com · Jun 17

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