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Unambiguous Evidence of Water On the Moon
Nethemas the Great writes "Information has leaked ahead of the scheduled NASA press conference tomorrow that we have found unambiguous evidence for water on the moon. From the article, 'Since man first touched the moon and brought pieces of it back to Earth, scientists have thought that the lunar surface was bone dry. But new observations from three different spacecraft have put this notion to rest with what has been called "unambiguous evidence" of water across the surface of the moon.'"
I'll be thirsty after the long ride.
The water these missions have found is present in very small quantities. Extracting it would require a lot of energy. The hope with polar water is that there might be masses of the stuff in some craters so that you could at least get a kilo of water from 20 or so kilos of regolith. Water in those quantities would be of use to humans. But we haven't seen it yet.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Since Apollo expedition brought back petrified wood from the moon, water was abundant there many years ago.
I hope that the Indians are able to establish a lunar colony; they certainly have the expertise.
The casinos might take off, that's a business that will attract customers no matter where you build one. If they've gone and bought Rotary Rocket's intellectual property, the ATV is certainly the right shape too. But there are precious few bison up there...
Stable substance composed of two of the most common and reactive elements in universe, common in the universe! News at 11.
POKE 36879,8
And here I was looking forward to eating a nice curry on the moon. I had the wrong Indians all along.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Whalers on the moon!
There have been persistent reports in the Indian press over the last 3 days that Nasa's Moon Minerology Mapper on board India's Chandrayaan-1 had found water, and that the Thursday press conference would reveal it. Glad to have the embargo lifted early. http://www.examiner.com/x-21670-Houston-Space-News-Examiner~y2009m9d22-Did-Chandrayaan1-confirm-ice-on-the-Moon http://www.rttnews.com/Content/GeneralNews.aspx?Node=B1&Id=1074265
Snake Oil/Dietery Supplement salesmen from the future:
"Lunar Water! Boosts your immune system! Eliminates Earthly toxins! Alleviates impotence, back pain, arthritis, digestive irregularity! Strengthens bones, teeth, and joints! BUT IT NOW! *ONLY* $250,000,000! Operators are standing by!
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
... "While the probe was still active, its NASA-built Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3) detected wavelengths of light reflected off the surface that indicated the chemical bond between hydrogen and oxygen" ... ... "At noon, when the sun's rays were strongest, the water feature was lowest, while in the morning, the feature was stronger." ...
From this they seem to draw the conclusion that the water is moving.
If they are measuring reflection, that includes such of sunlight and all other incoming light. Including that from the earth (sunlight reflected by the earth to the moon). The part of the light reflected from the earth does not depend on the intensity of the sunlight reaching the moon, but the earth. In other words: With increasing sunlight intensity the background noise of reflections from the earth is reduced.
I hope they got some backside measurements, and that there really is some water. But what was presented in the article doesn't really convince me.
"India's first lunar mission has found evidence of large quantities of water on its surface, The Times newspaper reported on Thursday."
from http://www.hindustantimes.com/Is-there-water-on-moon-NASA-to-reveal/H1-Article1-457426.aspx
Great news indeed. Still, it's depressing to think that we're still using an ancient, dangerous, primitive and very expensive space transportation technology: rocket propulsion. One thing is sure; we'll never colonize the solar system with rockets at the rate we're going.
But rejoice. Soon, a new form of transportation will arrive, one based on the realization that we are immersed in an immense ocean of energetic particles. This is a consequence of a reevaluation of our understanding of the causality of motion. Soon, we'll have vehicles that can move at tremendous speeds and negotiate right angle turns without slowing down and without incurring damages due to inertial effects. Floating cities, unlimited clean energy, earth to mars in hours, New York to Beijing in minutes... That's the future of energy and travel. Check it out.
The Problem With Motion
I guess that explains where all our arctic and antarctic ice caps have disappeared to then.
They are just doing this so it's less suspicious when you read "Unambiguous evidence of Cheetos on the moon". That's what you get when you cut NASA funding.
Yeah. Would you choose a neurosurgeon who pokes around people's brains in his spare time? I wouldn't.
The water these missions have found is present in very small quantities. Extracting it would require a lot of energy.
This is the bond of water. We know the rites.
A man's flesh is his own; the water belongs to the tribe.
Squirrel!
Actually, Native Americans have been lying to Americans all along. When anyone else visits, they're treated to really amazing curry, which puts Southern Asia's to shame.
India has launched seven satellites in 1200 seconds. http://www.voanews.com/english/2009-09-23-voa18.cfm Google finds a way writing an api to search /objects/ located in space, for doing this they shown willingness working with ISRO.
Next time you google black hole .. It will direct you to it [where you get sucked off]than showing a mere ass hole, or black lady or black music album. kudos.
The article says it's water or hydroxyl (although it quietly drops the alternative for a while and just calls what they're picking up "the water signal"). I'm no chemist, but hydroxyl != water, right? So it's not unambiguous?
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
The high cost to the human races colonisation of space is caused by
the complexity and danger of reaching escape velocity.
The Space Shuttle turned out to be an expensive dangerous white elephant, the reason the Shuttle was so expensive is, because of its complexity with millions of different manufactured parts.
There is another route, we can reach the edge of space no problem Burt Rutan proved this with Space Ship one when he won the 'X' prize by reaching over 100 km twice in one week.
Yes the Shuttle was 'reusable' but in name only. They could not have turned that around in a week.
One idea could be to create rocket fuel on the moon, this latest discovery of water on the moon means there is rocket fuel on the moon.
Use the rocket fuel to fuel a space moon tug, use the moon tug to accelerate 'Space Ship One' to escape velocity in a vacuum where it is safe to do and also the moon tug could be used to decelerate SS1 in a vacuum, again much more safe
Then we can use the moon as a fuel station, there are asteroids of ice, in the asteroid belt put rocket motors on the ice asteroids and fly them to the moon.
The moon is the door to the solar system.
It's called an elephant's trunk whereas it is in fact, an elephant's nose, a nose by any other name would smell as sweet
Chandrayaan, the moon probe sent by the Indian Space Research Organisation, carried the NASA-built Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3) that finally located water. This is a big boost to the Indian space program
Insight into much, Influence over nothing !
Alcohols have a hydroxyl group, so it could also be ethyl alcohol (C3C2OH).
Come on, everyone knows the moon is made out of cheese. I must say it is amazing that we actually know so little about the moon. If there was water on the moon, one would think we would have found it by now.
I've always rushed to the conclusion that unbound water on or close to the lunar surface won't stay there for long, because it would sublimate almost instantly due to the nearly zero pressure, with the resulting vapor quickly escaping the moon's weak gravity well.
Either the phase diagrams allow for solid water under the existing conditions (effect of low temperature > effect of low pressure), or maybe water sublimates more readily when the resulting vapor can dissolve into an atmosphere (e.g. by weakly binding with the other gases) than in a vacuum.
Can somebody point me to some relevant scientific info ? Yes, I'm too busy right now to GIM.
I'm not a coward by any name.
They actually DID find chemically bonded water in the rocks that were brought back from the moon, but the seals on the sample containers that the rocks were brought back in had failed, so scientists presumed that the small amounts of water they found had leaked in back on earth (humidity in the air) rather than having been present when on the moon.
No, they found the signature of hydrogen and oxygen bonded together, not just both hydrogen and oxygen. Thus there are at least hydroxyl compounds, if not water, on the moon. Regardless, it is the most direct evidence of water that we have ever found.
Well, then how about you explain why/how objects in motion tend to stay in motion or at rest. If it's that easy.
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It strikes me that since the Moon is similar in composition to the Earth, having been essentially "blown off" as a large chunk in its early development, that there would be a vast amount of water beneath the surface. Obviously not in liquid form, but far in excess of what you would find on the surface.
Who needs tiny bits of water when you can be playing blackjack with space hookers.
...and you thought Evian was expensive.
BTW I patent Bottled Moon Water!!!
Franklin screws up electrical charge convention and no one cares, Armstrong takes a wiz on Moon and everyone makes a fuss.
That's why we need manned space exploration: if we only had sent people instead of probes, they would have found this long ago!
Oh, wait...
I'm sure every nation on the planet would love to have one country (any country) put a nuclear power station on the moon... especially while most of them are claiming "renewable" energy as the new, big, thing while letting reactors that produce 100's of time more energy at the same environmental cost fall into disrepair.
And the next problem would be... how the hell do you get that kind of infrastructure up there? That's probably gonna weigh more than the total amount of payload the planet's ever put into space up until now, surely? And then you can power the moon, great, if you can get cables, and devices up there etc. Might be useful for fuel production but would probably cost more in fuel than it ever generates in a reasonable time. Vacuum of space, little gravity, low-weight materials, no modern conveniences (including difficulties communicating with the site remotely) - vacuum might well be a good heat-shield, but all that's gonna play with the physics beyond belief and take it back into highly experimental technology again.
Basically you're talking centuries into the future. By then I would hope that banging two bits of uranium together to keep warm will now seem like banging two bits of flint together does - archaic, inefficient, unreliable, etc.
There's plenty of solar power on the Moon's surface, and plenty of materials for construction in its crust. The first stage would be launching a small amount of automated fabrication machinery, run by a small crew, to build a solar power plant.
That plant could supply the energy to power the larger construction of a nuclear plant. Again, using local materials, and a larger crew supported by the larger infrastructure built by the solar power. The nuclear power available would be much larger than even the solar power.
Along the way, the power, infrastructure and crew would be capable of doing a lot more than building the next phase. Lunar science, other industrial engineering, telescopy, and launching other missions to farther out.
A solar base should take America no more than 5-8 years to build, if funded intelligently (ie, at the levels at which we love to fund wars for oil, but with a larger and more guaranteed return on investment). A nuclear base should take no more than 10 years to build, with probably 2-3 of those years performed during the 5-8 years building the solar plant. So the nuke plant could be operating somewhere 12-16 years or so from commencement. Since the US is right now deciding the entire roadmap for offplanet development, the clock should start in a year or two. Twenty years until we have sufficient power to explore, industrialize and colonize the nearby solar neighborhood is quite short, especially with lots of material benefits to show sooner along the way.
As for other countries, that's their problem. Many nuclear capable countries already launch nuke plants in satellites. That's a much more dangerous operation than building one on the Far Side of the Moon. And as usual, the US project will create the science and engineering, as well as working proof of concept, for other countries to do it themselves. We always give away some of the most valuable products of our investments in space, because it makes the world better in which Americans can live (as well as others who take advantage of it).
The US is going to put more and more nukes in space, even if it's just the CIA and Pentagon getting the monopoly. The more we do it for more peaceful and constructive purposes, the safer we'll be in every way. We could spend the next couple decades doing it. Or arguing why we shouldn't - and watching China, India, Russia, Japan and other global competitors doing it instead - and probably not as well. We can be Spain in this new age of exploration/colonization/industrialization, or we can be Britain. I'd like my grandchildren to keep speaking English.
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make install -not war
I beam with pride hearing that NASA has confirmed what earth based, and moon based observations have been stating for decades. It has been my personal experience that when one actually gets their hands dirty, they start to understand. Maybe NASA could put a manned clean room on the moon? That would be cool. Also, man would learn more with a Pick-Hammer, Shovel, and Bucket than all the time wasted on fly-by's.
Determining that, on Earth, you can reproduce the lighting from the Apollo photos != "the moon landing was entirely plausible"
Populus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur...
"Force shits upon Reason's back." - Poor Richard's Almanac
Casinos? Indiginous Americans ("Injuns") own casinos. The Indians own all the convienience stores.
Free Martian Whores!
Wow... Maybe we really will be whaling on the moon.
That would really be amazing if they found water, since I'm pretty sure they either found ice or steam. Water would be amazing and we'd have to rewrite the laws of physics.
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
Back under Apollo, we brought back samples that had small amounts of water. We assumed that it was simply a leak of our atmosphere into the containers. But it was a wrong assumption. It shows that we really can get things wrong.
Now, we have seen lots of interesting points on mars that suggests life (in particular, viking). Yet, we are over and over saying no. This makes me wonder if Mars will hold life. In addition, it really says that our first couple of human missions to mars really should be one-way (who knows how long it will take an alien virus/bacteria to show symptoms)
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Suuuuure lets just strap a damn rocketpack on the moon and aim it at us.
That sounds like a terrible idea that would never work anyway.
I prefer my idea of using Lunar local resources to generate power safely for more space operations. YMMV.
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make install -not war
Given the trace amounts of water still left, whoever colonized the moon is long gone by now. And so are the space Buffalo.
"No matter how cynical you get, it is impossible to keep up." -- Lily Tomlin
Hmm....Helium 3 is there too. Fusion baby.
"I prefer my idea of using Lunar local resources to generate power safely for more space operations."
Well if you consider detonating a reactor to propel the moon into the earth a safe space operation... no wait, you said generating the power would safe, not the space operation.
Carry on.
You evidently don't know how big the Moon is, or how much momentum is in its orbit around the Earth. Indeed, the Moon doesn't quite orbit the Earth, but rather the Moon and the Earth orbit one another around a center quite a ways away from the Earth's center. Or you just don't know how much energy can be produced by a nuke plant - a very tiny amount compared to what's needed to push the Moon out of orbit into the Earth in any appreciable amount of time.
But if you want to keep carrying on about some fact free paranoia, that's your business. Lunacy, but your business.
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Okay, I was willing to give your first response the benefit of the doubt as some form of dry humor. But with this post I have no choice but to say...
WWWHHHOOOSSSHHH
Just because my posts are going over your head doesn't mean you don't have to explain whatever it is you think is funny about what you're posting.
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make install -not war
Even being slapped over the head with it you are still going to pretend that:
"Suuuuure lets just strap a damn rocketpack on the moon and aim it at us."
Could possibly be a serious comment? Really. You actually think I (or anyone else) might legitimately believe that a nuclear meltdown on the moon would literally propel the moon into the earth?
OK, maybe Space 1999 is not the best source of scientific motivation for settling the moon, but there are others.
EG: It has been estimated to take $21 billion to launch Japan's space solar satellite. Wouldn't a moon base be able to handle all our satellite needs cheaper?
We could also use a moon base to build L5 colonies, which in turn could one day turn into slow boats to Mars and beyond.
Don't forget the H3 industry fusion reactors may also require.