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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. "
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Can we put Vanilla Ice there?
Granted there is no water on the moon, we'll have to bring it there ourselves I guess, presumably we're either importing from Earth, or how about nudging a comet towards the moon once the technology is feasible? As long as your aim is good (for the love of god don't miss and hit Earth), we could have a large supply of water available for long term moon usage indefinitely (when we run out, just nudge another comet, but control the landing of the comet if there's already people there).
...in bed
That means no brewery on the moon. So much for my dreams of being a drunken astronaut.
Trolling is a art,
Right, no ice for beer on the moon, everyone off to mars...
I owned that ice! Who took it????
before long :-)
This means that my great grand childrens' lunar snow cones bought at LunarDisney(tm) will cost 10 times as much! We shouldn't stand for this highway robbery!
Team leader Bruce Campbell
Did he vanquish the Mooninites, too?
Skiing on the moon would be no fun at all....no wind blowing in your face, a very slow speed...perhaps the only enjoyable thing would be ski jumps with REALLY long slopes to build up speed, then jump over a canyon or something.
Now I'll never be able to unload www.luxury-moon-ice-cubes.com.
Carousel is a lie!
I was just surfing the web and came across this Nova article about one of the possible theories over the creation of the moon. Its says that the moon is a result of a asteroid crashing into the earth and was formed by the pieces that were blasted off the earth. Here is a video animation they have on it.
30% Troll, 50% Underrated, 10% Interesting
Score:5, Troll
(a) similar studies done from *lunar orbit* favor the existence of ice. why is an earth-based study more accurate?
(b) the article states that only 20% of the permanently-shadowed surface was tested from arecibo. so why the unilateral conclusion?
it said there was no sheets of ice at the poles. There could still be grains. The previous survey showed a lot of hydrogen up there, and the best guess for how you get lots of hydrogen to stick around is as ice.
Not sure why you couldn't have methane mind...
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
Roll on the ESA's Smart 1 probe next year which will hopefully resolve the issue.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
Where's my ice?
There's a growing sense that even if The Future comes,
most of us won't be able to afford it.
-- Lemmy
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.
This is a common misunderstanding of what is meant by permanent shading on the moon. Note the phrase "polar ice" is key here.
In the polar regions, the sun is very low in the sky and there are places in deep craters where the sunlight, at any point in the Lunar day, never reaches.
It's the same as on the Earth. The bottom of a deep canyon near the south pole would never receive direct sunlight. The sun never moves above a certain altitude in the sky. Heck, the tilt of the Earth's axis give the poles permanent night (well, twilight) for six months. Not sure what the Moon's tilt is offhand, but that's a side issue.
--- Ban humanity.
You missed the "craters" part. They were working with deep craters, the bottoms of which don't get light due to the steep walls. As you get closer to the pole, the sun sits lower and lower in the southern sky, even when it's "high" noon.
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
Let's get this clear: they used a really really really really powerful radar, and then found that the ice "wasn't there". Uh huh. But now the moon does have strange clouds of water vapour... Whoops.
It amazes me that so many allegedly "educated" people have fallen so quickly and so hard for a fraudulent fabrication of such laughable proportions. The very idea that a gigantic ball of rock happens to orbit our planet, showing itself in neat, four-week cycles -- with the same side facing us all the time -- is ludicrous. Furthermore, it is an insult to common sense and a damnable affront to intellectual honesty and integrity. That people actually believe it is evidence that the liberals have wrested the last vestiges of control of our public school system from decent, God-fearing Americans (as if any further evidence was needed! Daddy's Roommate? God Almighty!)
.. the next time you're out in the backyard exercising your Second Amendment rights, the liberals will see it! These satellites are sensitive enough to tell the difference between a Colt .45 and a .38 Special! And when they detect you with a firearm, their computers cross-reference the address to figure out your name, and then an enormous database housed at Berkeley is updated with information about you.
Documentaries such as Enemy of the State have accurately portrayed the elaborate, byzantine network of surveillance satellites that the liberals have sent into space to spy on law-abiding Americans. Equipped with technology developed by Handgun Control, Inc., these satellites have the ability to detect firearms from hundreds of kilometers up. That's right, neighbors
Of course, this all works fine during the day, but what about at night? Even the liberals can't control the rotation of the Earth to prevent nightfall from setting in (only Joshua was able to ask for that particular favor!) That's where the "moon" comes in. Powered by nuclear reactors, the "moon" is nothing more than an enormous balloon, emitting trillions of candlepower of gun-revealing light. Piloted by key members of the liberal community, the "moon" is strategically moved across the country, pointing out those who dare to make use of their God-given rights at night!
Yes, I know this probably sounds paranoid and preposterous, but consider this. Despite what the revisionist historians tell you, there is no mention of the "moon" anywhere in literature or historical documents -- anywhere -- before 1950. That is when it was initially launched. When President Josef Kennedy, at the State of the Union address, proclaimed "We choose to go to the moon", he may as well have said "We choose to go to the weather balloon." The subsequent faking of a "moon" landing on national TV was the first step in a long history of the erosion of our constitutional rights by leftists in this country. No longer can we hide from our government when the sun goes down.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
Unfortunately for you, there is such a place. Maybe even more of them, dunno, I left my lunar map in my spacecraft, and I'm not in the mood to fetch it.
The place is called the Shackleton crater - which is a crater at the Lunar South Pole. Because of it location, the bottom of that crater is expected not to be exposed to sunlight ever.
As a coincidence, this is exactly the place where the Clementine mission observed radiation patterns indicating hydrogen presence - and which the referenced article also discusses.
Dude, that is why they are called theories, not laws. They only think that is what is happening or what has occured based on the best evidence. Science is full of theories that have been discounted. That is in fact one of the main goals of science. You come up with a hypothesis based on your theory, and see if the evidence supprts it. If it does, you have more evidence to support your theory. If it doesn't, then you hav more evidence which you can use to make a better theory. The big bang theory is a theory which not only was supported by the evidence at teh time of its inception but has since been corraborated by dozens and dozens of more evidence that it occured. Evolution has so much evidence going for it that most don't even consider it a theory. There are massive amounts of observations where evolution is the only explanation that makes any real sense. Take a class in psychology on Sensation and Perception if you don't believe me.
As to Lunar ice, science does not rely on single observations alone but must have duplicatable results. In other words, just becuase one person notices ice on the moon and forms a theory that it exists at the bottom of these craters does not mean that that is the case. Those observations have to be supported by doing multiple observations. In this case, those multiple observations shwed that lunar ice did not exist and that the theory for it was incorrect. We have now have even more evidence from which we can form an even better understanding of the moon. This is the way science works. If no theory ever got discounted, we would never get anywhere.
There's a growing sense that even if The Future comes,
most of us won't be able to afford it.
-- Lemmy
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.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
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.
please note that there is no mention of truth or falsity in Merriam-Webster's entry for "myth", except in a secondary denotation.
entries 2b and 3 would seem to be the only ones that should be cause for offense. however entry 1a works just fine in the curent context, unless you want to object to "ostensibly".
A theory is an explanation of a particular phenonmen often based on supporting evidence. A hypothesis is a conclusion derived from an understanding of the theory that is often the focus of the experiment. The hypothesis is tested, and depending on its results, a theory is either disporving or it is supported by the hypothesis. It is nearly impossible to prove a theory.
There's a growing sense that even if The Future comes,
most of us won't be able to afford it.
-- Lemmy
The radar astronomers admit that they were not able to probe Shackleton crater where Clementine got it positive reading. In any event, I doubt we are talking about much more than frost in the regolith. This is bad news for those who prattle on about stipmining the lunar south pole in order to manufacture rocket fuel.
an ill wind that blows no good
The Russian space programme is a very professional organisation, and I know for a FACT that there absolutely no drunken astronauts there. For shame! They are drunken cosmonauts, not astronauts.
Permanent shade is about as common on the Moon as on Earth, as all parts of the moon get sun light on a different schedual, but about the same average as Earth. Permanent shade is rare small areas, and lasts a few million years as the geographic poles of both bodies move over the long term. In my opinion polar ice on the moon, even in permanent shade would be gone in a million years, likely much less, because of energetic ions and photons from beyond our solar system. Most of the Earth-shine photons are not energetic enough to decompose ice at minus 250 degrees f and more than half of the permanently shaded areas from the Sun would also be permanetly shaded from Earth-shine. Neil Please minimise the funny comments.
Also, so what if it takes a lot of processing to get the water out of the soil. It's not like you don't have a great source of energy just over the crater wall.
This is probably a troll, but the parent got modded up, so I hope this could be considered part of the discussion here. I've tried to discuss this WITHOUT any hint of personal belief, so it can be absorbed by both sides of this issue.
Please note that science frequently requires as much faith as religion does.
You make a large number of statements that you posit as "fact" without any backing behind them. For example, evolution is NOT practically common sense. Quite the contrary, there are many SCIENTISTS (not religious nuts) who have serious problems with fitting Darwin's theories with observed facts. For example, the idea that DNA could self-organize from bare chemicals is difficult to support, when there are ZERO examples of lower-level compounds that appear to be precursors of DNA; this casts a certain pall on the entire concept of life-as-we-know-it-evolving-from-primoridal-goop. Many people I know actually believe in some middle-ground - like God-directed evolution, where God somehow sparked things off and put certain structures in place.
One problem many scientists willingly admit is that there are few rigorous examples of "macro-evolution" - huge-scale evolution between species. There are numerous examples of microevolution such as moths changing color in sooty areas of England, etc. But the fossil record, often used to "prove" evolution, contains HUGE gaps that cannot be explained (at this point). If you look at a realistic evolutionary species tree, you'll see lots of question marks and dashed or dotted lines. Granted, these may be simply a lack of having found the right fossil yet - but then again, whichever way you see THAT is a matter of faith, isn't it?
Much of the things you propose are myth or symbolic imply a disbelief in any deity. Be honest - that sort of invalidates you as capable of accurately evaluating a theological work from a theological perspective. To narrow that statement down, if you DO believe in God, it's not a far stretch to believe that God (by definition all-powerful) is easily capable of using natural phenomenon such as lightning or flood or earthquake or supernova to do his work. If he exists, and is all-powerful, and decided to create enough water to cover the earth, why not? The only reason it seems impossible to you is because you START from the viewpoint that there is no deity. That's a logical fallacy.
One interesting quandry for a scientific-thinking believer in God is "what did God choose to create?" Many creationists belive God created the fossil record, intact. Some believe that the record was created during Noah's flood. But you can also find people, quite intelligent people, who think that God chooses to use geology, cosmology, evolution etc. as tools to shape the world as we know it. Why not, after all? Why should any rational person try to limit a deity to a particular method of creation (such as the "ex nihilo", or instantaneous out-of-nothing creation)? (BTW, many Christian fundamentalists believe that if you don't believe in a literal King-James-Version interpretation of the Bible's story of a six-day creation, you throw away Truth as a concept. But others see more wiggle-room in the Genesis account - arguing that the original-language word for "day" actually is better translated "time", implying an epoch instead.)
As to the Big Bang, again, we have no comprehension whatsoever (scientifically) about why such an event would ever happen. Can you PROVE that such an event wasn't sparked by a deity? I don't believe so, any more than a deist could PROVE it was. So you operate on a certain level of faith, while the deist operates on a similar level - just in a different deity.
For these, and many more reasons, I find it foolish to make absolute statements about cause-and-effect of the universe in a public forum. We simply don't know enough, either way.
--Brandon / Split Infinity Music