In the fall of 2023, a U.S. rover will land at the south pole of the moon. Its mission: to explore the water ice that scientists know lurks within the lunar shadows, and which they believe could help sustain humans who may one day explore the moon or use it as a launching pad for more distant space exploration.

NASA recently selected Kevin Lewis, an associate professor in the Krieger School's Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences who has also worked on missions on Mars, as a co-investigator of the mission. Using part of the rover's navigational system, he plans to explore the moon's subsurface geology from his office in Olin Hall.

"I have been on other rover missions, but on Mars, so I'm a little bit new to the moon," Lewis said. "We're going to see into shadows that have never seen the sun, let alone been seen by humans. So it could be a very different type of surface than we've seen in other photos of the surface of the moon."

Drier than a desert

Someday, a swarm of cellphone-size robots could whisk through the water beneath the miles-thick icy shell of Jupiter's moon Europa or Saturn's moon Enceladus, looking for signs of alien life.