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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...
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....
Clearly not common enough to assume that it was present in this particular location without direct evidence.
... "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.
I actually was under the impression that due to the low gravity and lack of atmosphere, water was thought to be unstable on places like the moon... obviously, given this report, this is not the case, but I thought that was the old line?
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
"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
...and ultraviolet light from the sun which breaks the water molecule down into oxygen and hydrogen. Water is unstable on the surface where it gets exposed to light but it should be stable in shadow on the surface and under ground. The problem is that almost no places on the surface have remained shadowed for hundreds of millions of years (except possibly the polar craters) and shallow subsurface still get rotated to the surface by meteor impacts, while deep places are... deep and hard to reach.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
I guess that explains where all our arctic and antarctic ice caps have disappeared to then.
Whether it is common enough to assume presence is not clear at all. What's clear is that we didn't assume it.
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 !
The scan works by looking for the OH bond, as I recall, which resonates on a particular frequency. I may be talking nonsense now, because it's a few years since I looked at this tech, but it basically works on the same principle as your microwave oven. That emits microwaves that cause the OH bonds to resonate, exciting the molecules and generating heat. This works by causing the OH bonds to resonate (in exactly the same way) and then picking up the IR that they emit as they return to their non-excited state. All that it can conclusively say is that there are molecules containing OH bonds present, but the simplest molecule containing this bond is water and so it's very probable that they've found water. Even if they haven't, they've found something that can be turned into water relatively easily, given sufficient power (e.g. a lunar solar array).
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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.
--
make install -not war
The scan works by looking for the OH bond, as I recall, which resonates on a particular frequency. I may be talking nonsense now, because it's a few years since I looked at this tech, but it basically works on the same principle as your microwave oven. That emits microwaves that cause the OH bonds to resonate, exciting the molecules and generating heat. This works by causing the OH bonds to resonate (in exactly the same way) and then picking up the IR that they emit as they return to their non-excited state. All that it can conclusively say is that there are molecules containing OH bonds present, but the simplest molecule containing this bond is water and so it's very probable that they've found water. Even if they haven't, they've found something that can be turned into water relatively easily, given sufficient power (e.g. a lunar solar array).
You're pretty much right on. Every molecular bond has several resonant energies for different types of vibrational modes, and a primary way of finding what you have in a sample is irradiating it and measuring at which frequencies it's absorbing energy. The MMM is specifically designed to detect in the range where hydroxy absorption would be detected, unlike previous moon mappers. (Why? I wonder. It seems like that'd be a basic thing they'd want to detect, and my memory of IR spectrometers and spectrophotometers is that it's a massive peak across a wide range of wavelengths.) Anyway, they're detecting sunlight reflected from the surface and measuring the areas in which there has been a lot of absorption to detect what's down there, if I read their description correctly.
As a side-note, it is (on paper) possible to tell something about what's adjacent to a molecular bond, to distinguish between (in this case) water and sugar, both of which have -OH bonds, because the stuff adjacent will change the frequency at which the bond you're looking at vibrates by adding or removing a bit of electron density from it. However, in the particular case of the -OH bond, as I recall, it's such a broad peak that it's not very informative.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
Some virus can survive centuries.
Bacteria mutate fairly easily.
Prions are still large unknowns.
And it is possible for life to be something different than what we are looking for.
Any mission that goes there should be one-way for a LONG time.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.