Lunar Polar Ice Not Present

pclark999 writes "The New Scientist reports that radar probes of the lunar polar region has disproved earlier theories regarding large sheets of polar ice in craters permanently in the shade. "

Comments

Actually, you are dead wrong.

[mindstrm]

There are areas in the polar region where the bottoms of craters are in eternal shade, and that is precisely what these studies are talking about.

And when we say "The dark side of the moon".. we are referring to either a Pink Floyd album, or the side of the moon that is currently in darkness.. so the dark side of the moon is indeed always dark.. just like the dark side of the earth.

Hydrogen is more important than water

[G4from128k]

Although finding water would be nice, the real issue is finding a long-term source of hydrogen on the moon. The moon offers plenty of long-term sources of oxygen as a byproduct of processing moon rocks. But hydrogen may be scarer, unless there really is a concentration of either water or hydrated rock at the poles. Without hydrogen, life gets much harder. Perhaps the moon really is a harsh mistress.

Well sweet goddamn.

[Anonymous Coward]

What are you doing here on slashdot? Better get yourself down there and edumicate some so-called scientists. Shit, if they were so daft to overlook this simple "fact", they don't deserve to call themselves scientists.

Re:Well sweet goddamn.

[Daniel Dvorkin]

What are you doing here on slashdot? Better get yourself down there and edumicate some so-called scientists. Shit, if they were so daft to overlook this simple "fact", they don't deserve to call themselves scientists.

Thank you. It's too bad you posted as an AC, because your post deserves wider exposure than it's probably going to get. My kingdom for some mod points!

It seems like every story about any scientific controversy on /. brings out a bunch of trolls -- who don't even realize they're trolls -- who feel compelled to roll out some half-remembered fact from 8th-grade science class to "prove" that what these scientists are doing is clearly ridiculous and doomed to failure. Um ... guess what, guys, the people working on the project in question already thought of your objection a looong time ago. For whatever reason, they've dismissed that objection -- and you can be sure that they had good reasons for doing so.

And even that lends too much credence to objections like the grandparent poster's. Saying, "there's no ice on the moon because it would have evaporated a long time ago" to a planetary scientist studying the possibility of lunar ice is roughly akin to someone with an elementary-school grasp of mathematics saying, "there's no such thing as the square root of a negative number, so what's with all these idiot mathematicians talking about i ?"