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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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That means no brewery on the moon. So much for my dreams of being a drunken astronaut.
Trolling is a art,
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.
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!
Say WHAT?
(although we get tonnes of stuff from space every day)...
Yeah, like, uh, sunlight?
You know... that bright stuff without which 99.9% of this ecosystem could not exist?
--- Ban humanity.
Roll on the ESA's Smart 1 probe next year which will hopefully resolve the issue.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
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.
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.
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.