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Closer to Deducing the Origin of the Moon
eldavojohn writes "A giant explosion on the sun in January of 2005 allowed SMART-1 (a European spacecraft orbiting the moon) to detect what elements the moon is made up of based on the X-rays from the sun's explosion. This allows scientists to speculate on the moon's origins while seeing data from all over the moon as opposed to the core samples we have collected and returned in the past. From the article: 'Scientists responsible for the D-CIXS instrument on SMART-1 are also announcing that they have detected aluminium, magnesium and silicon. "We have good maps of iron across the lunar surface. Now we can look forward to making maps of the other elements." said SMART-1's Principal Investigator.'"
13And the evening and the morning were the third day.
14And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years:
15And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so.
16And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also.
17And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth,
18And to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good.
"Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us." -Jesus Christ The Lord's Prayer
Forget the origins of the moon. The moon's here. What I find interesting is that they're mapping the elements on the moon, and where they are. This gives us a map of where to go mine. They already said they found iron; eventually, someone will find a way to make moon mining more monetarily motivational.
I used to carry a bottle of whiskey for snake bite. And two snakes. -Nefarious Wheel
Unless you can pull out huge chunks of the metals at one go without much work or processing, I seriously doubt it. Just getting a couple people on the surface to walk around a bit is massively expensive... forget about a sustained effort with mining equipment, life support and everything else you'd need.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
12 oz. per lb. Precious metals are mesured in troy oz, not avoirdupois.
No. The only unique property of moon ore is that it isn't inside such a big gravity well, so it is less expensive to move up into space. And unless something fantastically rare and useful can be found there, even the most prized minerals would only be attractive in massive amounts because you would first have to more the necessary equipment up there, not to mention transport capacity to get the stuff to any buyer.
Only tourism and science are likely to be viable there in the foreseeable future. Big exception: if we unexpectedly manage to get automated construction from raw minerals to work, this could make industry on the moon so cheap it could become viable to start mining and export there. However, this isn't going to happen anytime soon, and when it does it will end capitalism as we know it anyway, so it is nothing you could base a business model on.
blow your mind already
Here's a few more details about this Impact Theory:
s tions/question38.html
"The basic idea is this: about 4.45 billion years ago, a young planet Earth -- a mere 50 million years old at the time and not the solid object we know today-- experienced the largest impact event of its history. Another planetary body with roughly the mass of Mars had formed nearby with an orbit that placed it on a collision course with Earth. When young Earth and this rogue body collided, the energy involved was 100 million times larger than the much later event believed to have wiped out the dinosaurs. The early giant collision destroyed the rogue body, likely vaporized the upper layers of Earth's mantle, and ejected large amounts of debris into Earth orbit. Our Moon formed from this debris."
Plus, this page has a really cool rendering of the Impact:
http://starchild.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/StarChild/que
Health Insurance Quotes
Gold is at about $625 per troy ounce or 480 grains, or about $1.30 per grain. A troy pound is 12 ounces or 5760 grains, whereas an avoirdupois pound, used in launch masses, is 7000 grains, so one avoirdupois pound of gold is worth about $9100.
I suspect retrieving dissolved gold from the ocean would be more cost-effective.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
Your point doesn't stand - the moon mineral composition is fundamentally different from Earth's for the straight forward reason that it was made up of materials from Earth's outer layers - it lacks the heavy elements that concentrate in the Earth's core.
Clear, Dark Skies
Its an accepted theory that the Moon originated from the Earth.
Sometime in Earth's early history, before the formation of life, a large Mars-sized object probably collided with the Earth throwing off a massive amount of material.
For a time its believed the Earth might have had a Saturn-like ring system until tidal/gravitational forces caused the material to begin clumping together into what would one day be the moon. Its also likely that some material rained back down on the Earth. Supporting this theory is the well known fact the Earth has a very faint, barely detectable, ring.
Michael "TheZorch" Haney
thezorch@gmail.com
http://thezorch.googlepages.com/home
He was talking about the precious metals value. That is in troy oz still. If you, or he, want to take them someplace you do the conversion to those upity new metric things.
"My car gets forty rods to the hogshead, and that's the way I likes it!" - Grampa Simpson
To me, the tricky part of getting it here would be landing it. Sure, you can get it to the Earth fairly easily--Moon has low gravity, Earth has high gravity, etc. The problem to me is that you kind of need to arrange a soft landing for it. So you have to slow down, say, 1,000,000 pounds traveling at, say, 20,000 MPH and set it down gently on the Earth.
That's gonna take a lot of energy.