Slashdot Mirror
No Ice on the Moon
eldavojohn writes "In 1994, there was speculation that there might be a southern ice cap on the moon — something our exploration of it could take advantage of. Unfortunately, recent evidence has come to light revealing that this probably isn't true." From the article: "If there is any ice at the South Pole, it probably comes from tiny, scattered grains that probably account for only one or two percent of the local dust, the authors suggest. "Any planning for future exploitation of hydrogen at the Moon's South Pole should be constrained by this low average abundance rather than by the expectation of localized deposits at higher concentrations," the paper says soberly. The research involved sending a radar signal from the Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico. The signal hit the southern lunar region and the reflection was picked up by the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia." Well, it looks like we're going to have to hit Hoth before we hold that kegger on the moon."
[sarcasm]Clearly this was infact the first time you click on the "Read More" link.[/sarcasm]
It happens sometimes when you click the link too soon after it shows up on the main page.
Sarcasm because 50-60% of the discussions have quite a few jokes about that message...
No Margaritas on the moon? And after NASA spent million developing a low gee blender.
I live in WV and have seen the Green Bank Telescope. Impressive radio telescope. Not as impressive as Arecibo though. I was expecting more like an array but it really is just one giant dish.
Better link than in the story:
http://www.gb.nrao.edu/
B.
This is a sig. This is only a sig. Had this been an actual sig you would have been informed where to tune for more sigs.
These types of stories seem to go back and forth. First the moon had no water/ice/hydrogen, then they thought there might be some subsurface ice/water, then maybe ice at the south pole, now nothing. I wouldn't be surprised if another study came out revealing that the moon was actually made of ice with a couple feet of moon rock and dust on top. If nothing else, the constantly changing ideas of our moon's makeup is keeping plenty of scientists employed.
Crack - Free with every butt and set of boobs
YOU!! off my planet
God was my co-pilot, but then we crashed and I was forced to eat him.
Note that no water doesn't mean no hydrogen. You can produce hydrogen from most rocks too. It takes too much energy, I hear the peanut gallery cry? Nah, energy on the moon is abundant -- there's no atmosphere to filter the sunlight, and all you need is time to wait. So what if it takes fifty times as much free energy as breaking up water?
That's no moon...! That's a Space Station!
Windows has detected an undetectable error.
No, it's cheese!
Next we'll hear that it's not actually made of cheese.
1% (speculated proportion of water in the dust) seems like a lot to me. Separating that 1% of water from the dust would probably be more cost effective than bringing it up from Earth.
We're whalers on the moon, We carry a harpoon. But there ain't no whales So we tell tall tales And sing our whaling tune.
Just send a bunch of scornful women to the moon, and there will be LOTS of ice in no time.
By that I mean, I hate my wife.
Umm... didn't I read that we had done some kind of secondary scan and confirmed water ice on the moon just beneath the surface of the poles?? How do you confirm something and now deny it? Maybe I'm confused as to the meaning of "confirm", but I generally take it to be an observation which validates a prior observation as true and definitive.
In 1994, there was speculation that there might be a southern ice cap on the moon -- something our exploration of it could take advantage of. Unfortunately, recent evidence has come to light revealing that this probably isn't true.
Lucky for us! now we don't have to worry about the ice pirates.
Push Button, Receive Bacon
Science fiction writers (the hard- variety) like Stephen Baxter have been lamenting the likelyhood of this eventuality for years now. Not that it isn't nice to at least have some closure, but on the other hand it seems like the news is little more than the last nail in the coffin for the most obvious pas-de-terre between Earth and space.
There is one book--Manifold Space, I think it might be--that muses upon the notion that there may be some water deeply buried (e.g. 20+ kilometres) the surface, and all the difficulties involved in getting to it (e.g. standard mining techniques developed on Earth wouldn't work there for a host of reasons). Excellent book/series, incidentally. Strongly recommended for any space science enthusiasts.
It's an anti-spam technique that allows non-members time to read before responding, and members time to watch for the article to actually go live-live. Presumably, it helps cut down on the "First Post!" trolling. The period only lasts about a minute or two, so it's not really a big deal. I'm sure it's semi-documented in the Slashcode somewhere.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Wasn't there also talk about ice in deep craters situated where the sun can never shine on it?
...at least that's what I recall. It sounds kinda plausible.
The theory was (and I hope I have this right) that cometary ice must impact the moon from time to time - so there is water there from time to time - but whenever the sun shines, in the absence of an atmosphere, the water will evaporate (sublimate?) away quite quickly during the lunar day - then freeze out of the atmosphere during the night.
This mechanism would generally keep whatever water molecules there is up there moving around...*UNTIL* (by chance) it lands somewhere where there is never any sunlight - inside a cave or a deep crater. At that point it must settle - and there is no longer a mechanism to move it around again. With no atmosphere to scatter sunlight, permenantly dark places will be profoundly cold.
It follows then that whatever water there is will always end up in these relatively rare places EVENTUALLY - so given enough time, all of the moon's water would end up stashed away in just a few easy-to-predict places.
Furthermore, we'd never be able to see those places from earth-bound or low orbit telescopes because any place we can see must also collect sunlight at some point in the lunar orbit.
www.sjbaker.org
The real question is what percent of that dust is cheese!?
Sometimes stories just go back, and not forth. I suspect this is one of them.
Back in the Apollo days, a Saturn V third stage was allowed to smash into the moon so seismographs could pick up the vibrations. This and other tests allowed scientists to get a basic idea of the moon's interior structure. A core or crust of ice would have been pretty obvious. If there was any ice, it would have to be just traces.
Our instruments are getting increasingly better. This is a case of a hypothesis based on observations by a crude instrument being disproved by follow-up investigations by more sophisticated gear.
I'm disappointed, but hey, the universe wasn't designed to things easy for us.
Gold is economical to extract from ore that has less than one ounce of gold per ton.
Water is going to be more valuable than gold to someone on the Moon.
Water is way easy to extract.
You're right, I'm sick of all this experimentation, observation, hypothesis, confirming, refuting, erk! What's the point of it? What do the scientists call this process anyway?
</sarcasm>
How we know is more important than what we know.
Of course we're not going to get past the Van Allen belts with an attitude like that!
It'd be a real bummer if this research proves true, because having water readily available on the moon would be a help in our (looong-term) future plans.
But, that doesn't mean that there can't be a whole lot of ice there someday. In the future, about the time when interplanetary travel becomes feasible and large quantities of water are needed, we will also have the technology to go out and capture water. One of the great motivations for interplanetary travel is mining asteroids for their abundant mineral wealth. Some consider capturing and towing an asteroid into Earth orbit for better availability. Why not capture and tow a water-rich comet, too? If there are grave concerns about it hitting the earth, just bring it very slowly towards the moon and orbit it there. It would be easily accessible there from the moon and from spacecraft, much higher in Earth's gravity well than LEO.
This is hardly a new idea - I think Arthur Clarke was a big proponent of it. I'm not advocating that we try it out in the next few years, either - I'm just saying that getting water to the moon, by the time we need lots of it, isn't that farfetched.
Minion Angel: "Hey boss, where should I stick all this extra water?"
God: "You can stick it where the sun don't shine."
Mmm, actually, the way it worked is this:
(1) Clementine observed a particular wiggle in the radar reflection. At the time, it was thought the only reasonable way to get that wiggle was to have the radar reflect off ice. Huzzah! Ice! (Well, not really. It hasn't been directly observed -- no one's held it in their hand -- but it seemed no other explanation would account for the wiggle.)
(2) Now someone has come up with an alternative explanation for the wiggle, and demonstrated that you can get it from areas (sunlit areas) which really shouldn't have ice. Throws cold water, so to speak, on the idea that only ice can make the radar signature wiggle.
But does this mean no ice? Nope. Now we have two explanations for Clementine's observation: ice or some surface roughness thingy. Which is the right cause? Could be ice, could be merely rough rocks, could be both.
So it's not that ice on the Moon has been disproved. It's that a previous proof (or strong suggestion of) ice on the Moon has been shown to be in error. Doesn't mean the ice isn't there. Just means we no longer know (or think we know) whether it is or not. Have to go take a shovel and find out, I think.
A lot of the dialogue thus far has centered around either the "who cares" mentality, or "yada yada yada...just scientists theorizing and refuting each other over time". One of the posts that was actually nearer the mark mentioned that as technology gets better, so to do our means of verifying and refuting existing theories on possible resources for further exploration. Say we stopped doing research based on the presumptions of 20 years ago and spent trillions to get all the supplies up to the Southern Pole only to find no water. How smart would we think we were then? I'd rather see a couple million spent on research to refute/verify theories instead of trillions to attempt imlementation of practical efforts to extract energy based on flawed theory.
Just another nameless binary in a crowd of 1's and 0's
After reading this article, I feel like when you used to watch Spock look into his mystery screen and make pronouncements about just about anything. "Captain, the enemy captain is wearing green boxers!"
/moon/ pick it up somewhere else, and know that there is no water there. Damn amazing to me.
We bounce some radar off of the freaking
Steve
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
The moon has no ice!? It's like some outer space motel 6! *ducks*
> Lucky for us! now we don't have to worry about the ice pirates.
Nothing to worry about there! The IIAA (Ice Industry Association of America) has the situation (and other members) well in hand!
The wavelength's just a tad bit longer than visible light ;)
Water will cost $100000 a drip when that is done..albeit with current technology.
My Blog | Badsh
Sublimation is solid to gas. Deposition is gas to solid.
Vaporization is conversion to gas, regardless of original state (sublimation and evaporation are both types of, and the only types of, vaporization).
And my CAPTCHA is "inform".
What Van Allan belt? Don't you know it caught fire and was blown up by an atomic missile back in the early '60s?
Good, inexpensive web hosting
So all this proves is that the Clementine experiment may not have detected ice after all. There is nothing in this experiment which would have directly measured ice if it had been present.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Ah yes, back in the era when exploding a nuclear bomb was the solution to basically everything.
Thanks North Korea! Thanks for killing Santa!
That's too bad. I guess the astronaouts will have to drink their cocktails luke warm.
Opinions expressed above are mine, and not my employees'.
something our exploration of it could take advantage of
Jesus Tap-Dancing Christ.
Slashdot quality declines as the number of hot grits posts decreases. - Provolt's Law, Apr-09-2005
So my favorite Total Recall movie was all trash after all ?
You ended that sentence in a preposition...bastard!
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
Thomas Gold used radar studies to show that the surface of the moon was made entirely of soft dust which an astronaut would sink right through. And he was right. The top millimetre of the moon (which is all the radar could see) really is like that.
A highly oblique illumination of the lunar south pole from 4000000km away can not prove that there is no ice on the moon. Ground penetrating radar from orbit or the surface will prove that to a certain depth.
Its worth noting that the control samples which apollo astronauts took from under the LM descent stage failed to show any volatiles at all, despite the fact that they had been gardened by the engine exhaust. There could be water on the moon and we wouldn't see signs of it elsewhere.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
It seems like plenty of the water would just diffuse off into space.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
...BEER DON'T NEED NO ICE!
That which does not kill her only prolongs my agony.
OK, whoever gave this a +1 Informative mod - hand over your Geek Card! You are no longer a card-carrying Geek. Please take a Dork card on your way out. (Geeks know that radio waves and light are two different ways to refer to the same thing, and that yes, it matters if you block it when you're talking about a telescope observing any part of the spectrum.)
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
As comets approach the sun, they develop a tail, caused by the solar wind. If you keep a comet "tethered" in orbit around the earth, it is going to be constantly eroded by the solar wind, and the earth will be bombarded by the crap falling off whenever we are "downwind" of it.
If it was in orbit around the moon, the same would happen, which may or may not be a useful way to get the comets contents onto the lunar surface. But it would be quite inefficient, as the percentage of time where the tail would hit the moon would be quite low. So unless you kept motors running to hold it always in the same position relative to the sun you would lose most of the material to space. Motors add inefficiency.
All this is assuming you could capture a comet in the first place. The inertia alone would mean you would have to gradually change its orbit, and that could take thousands of years to get it where you wanted it, and have a massive fuel supply to keep adjusting the comets course over that time.
I think that we have more efficient ways already available to get water to the moon, they are just expensive. Time is an expense too, so if you need something now, it's usually more costly.
OTOH, it might be worthwhile attaching a craft to a comet as it passes us, and adopting its orbit long enough to extract a supply of whatever chemicals/gases we can, and using them as fuel for longer distance travel.
Total recall took place on earth (briefly) and mars. They never even mentioned the moon.
Cheers to Futurama!
Or didn't they? Legend tells us that about 13 people have been on and around the moon. What did they see? Don't they have samples?
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
My first reaction to the "no-ice" announcement was actually joy. I'm a science nut, but I can just envision the hordes of humans that might've otherwise arrived and wasted any handy resources for tourists and the like. I don't want to see a corporate logo appear on the moon's face, for instance.
I hope we don't infect the rest of the solar system until we're more responsible. This could mean just being good stewards of "our" own planet before we hope to know what to do with others.
Not a Luddite; robotic exploration gives the best bang for the buck, but we should have a double helping of humble pie before salivating over Pie-in-the-Sky.
I know my economic head is in the sand, but there's still lots of junk on Luna (and the European Space Agency just smacked it again !?!) and I wish humanity were wiser. This is not a troll, just a sentimental foo bar.
Hydrogen can be extracted from the Solar Wind. Oxygen is available from moon rocks. Together they make water.
While true, I think you are being needlessly glum here.
For example, it is true that normal pumps would not work for removing rain water from a lunar ice-mine, because they rely on the pressure of the atmosphere. But having your lunar ice-mine fill with water is not nearly as big of a problem as you might think. All you need to do is change all the signage to read "Lunar Well" instead and you're done.
Likewise, a canary can not be used to detect when the air goes bad in a lunar mine (because there isn't any), but this can be solved by having the canary wear a little spacesuit, and supplying it with little tanks of air from the same source as the miners are using.
And further, some techniques developed on Earth (e.g., the Company Store) would actually work better on the moon!
--MarkusQ
Screw the moon, deliver it to Australia, how many years have we been in drought now?
I want to head off an possible confusion. This new information has absolutely no bearing on the development of carbon-nanotube teather to be used for a space elevator. That project is still completely and totally ridiculous psuedo-science deserving of our scorn and mockery. Please do not be confused.
This study does *not* indicate that there is no ice in permanently shadowed areas of the Moon. Before this study came out, there were two widely cited lines of evidence for ice:
1) Lunar Prospector found elevated hydrogen near the poles using a neutron spectrometer
2) Clementine bi-static radar (and later ground-based measurements) found backscatter effects that looked like ice
Most planetary geologists weighted (1) more heavily. There was always a lot of argument about interpretation of (2).
Now this study comes along and fairly definitively throws out (2) by showing the data has another explanation. Fine. From (1) we still have solid evidence of hydrogen near the poles, and most geologists would agree that the likeliest explanation of that hydrogen is water ice deposits in permanently dark crater interiors (the only places cold enough for ice to be stable in a vacuum).
So the main impact of this study is to suggest (but not prove) that ice, if present, is not found in clumps of centimeter scale or larger. And the 1% concentration figure they cite is a *lower* bound, not an upper bound. That is, ice could be more concentrated than 1% in some regions below neutron spectrometer resolution (e.g. kilometer scale) and we would have no way to know.
why don't they just bring an ice machine next time they go to the moon? And some bacteria too then they'll be happy :-D
Is it just me or is it not going to upgrade to Vista in here?
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Global Warming has taken out the moon's polar ice caps too!
I guess I'll put away my moon-skates, then.
I had visions of Red Planet (the one by Heinlein, not Hoffman) where they ice-skate down the canals. So many dreams, too many dang scientists!
Rocket Scientist + Brain Surgeon = Rocket Surgeon! (Let's get this O.R. in orbit!)
Excuse my ignorance and lack of knowledge (I'm no astonomer), but if the moon was -made- of ice, wouldn't it have all/mostly vaporized by now? Wouldn't that also negate the theory that the moon was created from Earth due to a megacatastrophic impact?
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master."
We're whalers on the moon,
We carry a harpoon.
But there ain't no whales
So we tell tall tales
And sing our whaling tune.
"Waitress I need two more boat-drinks..."
Big headlines! Big budget! ... oops, the original "discovery" was a mistake.
For single researchers, it's called academic fraud.
For a large organization it's apparently a valid management style.
A person could get cynical.
I believe the whole ice one the Moon thing was mostly hyped up by the media. I think that few in the scientific community actually _expected_ to find it (though most would agree it's worth looking, and would _hope_ to find it). While you could certainly keep the ice around in sheltered craters at the poles, actually _delivering_ it is a bit trickier. You could hit it with comets, but that mateial would vaporize on impact and mostly be lost.
Ahh, whoops.
The meaning of terms depends on context and audience. If you refer to radio waves as "light", you will be misunderstood not only by laymen, but also by people who know about the physics of "light" in many contexts. Furthermore, when talking about blocking, wavelength matters, and it makes a big difference whether it's "(visible) light" or "radio waves". In this context, "radio waves hitting the dish" is the correct usage, while "light hitting the dish" is sloppy, unnecessarily imprecise, and misleading. If you want to be generic about it, the correct term is "electromagnetic radiation hitting the dish", not "light hitting the dish".
"You can stick it where the sun don't shine."
What that place over in Lancre?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.