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Closer to Deducing the Origin of the Moon

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the someone-should-apologize-for-the-broken-planet dept.

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.'"

6 of 265 comments (clear)

  1. Valuable metals? by Ed+Avis · · Score: 4, Interesting

    What are the odds that the moon turns out to be composed partly of gold, or platinum or palladium? Would moon mining be profitable?

    --
    -- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
    1. Re:Valuable metals? by 140Mandak262Jamuna · · Score: 2, Interesting
      Even if the cost of transporting Moon gold to Earth is zero, it will not make goldmining profitable in Moon. It would just make gold mining unprofitable on Earth.

      For example Amethyst used to included in the list of cardinal gems, (i.e. diamond, ruby, sapphire and emerald). But huge discoveries in Russia and South America has erorded its value to almost that of costume jewellery. On my way to work I pass a shop window displaying an Amethyst geode some three feet long and 1 feet across, partially opened. Must weight a few kilograms. Price? 1750$. So sudden discovery of huge quantities of chiefly ornamental substance will only diminish the value.

      --
      sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
    2. Re:Valuable metals? by east+coast · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Also consider refinement and mining costs. We're not going to find this stuff in bar form just laying on the surface. It's going to raise the costs significantly, I'm sure.
       
      I wonder how much gold would need to be brought to earth to effect the market value of gold. There's a chance that, in order to profit, a company would need to mine so much gold that their returns would faulter on a decline in gold prices due to a surplus.

      --
      Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
    3. Re:Valuable metals? by misleb · · Score: 2, Interesting
      You won't need much work - moon's gravity is far less than that of Earth so extracting and packing large boulders of stuff without machinery then becomes possible. Just pick up a boulder, and move.


      Are you seriously suggesting that humans *manually* mine the Moon? You've got to be kidding. Yeah, I'm sure astronauts are going to be lining up to train for years just to go to the moon to work as slave labor because hauling machinery up there is too expensive. Even in the worst of times, humans have had beasts of burden to the the heavy lifting.

      How, pray-tell, do they dig? How do they get these "light" boulders free? Gravity on the moon might be a lot less than Earth, but it is still there. It is 1/6th Earth's gravity. So a 600 lb. boulder would still weigh 100 lbs on the moon.

      Also, note that moon dust is very harmful to the suits that were used on previous missions there. After a couple days of walking around, astronauts could barely move the suits because moon dust is like tiny little shards of glass. If you think getting beach sand in places where the sun don't shine is bad, try moon dust.

      -matthew
      --
      "THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
  2. Re:More Details by bigpat · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Anyone else think that Hudson Bay and Foxe Basin look like an impact crater from an oblique impact?

    http://maps.google.com/maps?ie=UTF8&t=k&om=1&ll=62 .915233,-83.935547&spn=28.413586,63.984375

  3. Findings Make Sense... by ElboRuum · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The findings make sense for the theory which states that an off-center impact of a largish planetesimal merged with the nascent earth 'momentarily', then threw off a globule roughly the same size as that planetesimal. It makes sense if you consider that the earth's mantle is made primarily of molten silicate rock and light metals, so an impact which 'punctured' the earth and 'kept on going' would have passed through the mantle and taken the mantle rock with it. The moon, if the samples brought back are any indicator, is more than likely nothing more than a solidified blob of ejected mantle collapsed to a sphere due to its mass. Of course, the fact that the moon is slowly moving away is another good indication of a birthing impact as it seems to suggest a point of origin. The earth is probably too small to have captured a body the size of the moon anyway. Another good piece of evidence is the fact that the moon always faces the earth on the same side, a coincidence of angular momentum that suggests that the moon was once a part of earth.