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NASA's LCROSS Mission Proves Lunar Ice Suspicions
NASA is reporting that preliminary data from the LCROSS mission indicates that there really is water in one of the permanently shadowed lunar craters, just as they suspected back in September. "'We are ecstatic,' said Anthony Colaprete, LCROSS project scientist and principal investigator at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif. 'Multiple lines of evidence show water was present in both the high angle vapor plume and the ejecta curtain created by the LCROSS Centaur impact. The concentration and distribution of water and other substances requires further analysis, but it is safe to say Cabeus holds water.'"
Wait ... I'm the one who does that. Never mind.
Continue.
It's NOT me! It's the meds! I'm on 1000mg of Fukitol.
Base on the moon! Lets go fuckers!
Long live the BSD license
Glad they're not treading water anymore. I wonder who won the "pool"? I hope these results really make a splash.
How is the Lunar water suspicious?
So now we need to get up there with some drilling equipment and figure out if there's actually water beneath the surface or if the only water on the moon is trace amounts leftover from the occasional comet impact.
Where there is water there is life...and death! Death to all who disturb the moon water guardians.
Okay seriously, this is pretty big news. Kudos to NASA for another successful mission!
Anyone else really want to use this water to make liquor? Even if coke just bottled it, I'd drink some moon water.
I mean will Lunar Springs really be able to compete in the bottled water sector? Will I be able to choose between filtered and "Some Regolith"?
Whales live in water.
There is water on the moon.
Therefor it is reasonable to assume there are whales on the moon.
The lunar whales are likely to be hunted by whalers.
Proving that Futurama is 100% correct and there are whalers on the moon.
They probably carry harpoons.
The prophecy will be fulfilled.
There will be whalers on the moon.
, but it is safe to say Cabeus holds water
Or, maybe it did hold water... until the impact.
Finally! Something we can mine the Moon for. This will spur space competition to get this valuable resource. I can't wait for my first sip of $10000 Evian Moon Mineral Water.
When they say ice and water, are they talking about the stuff you can fill up your canteen and go, or is there something else in it that would make it undrinkable?
I ask because Mars has its ice caps, but as I understand it's just dry-ice (frozen CO2) that would make for an awesome Halloween party effect, but obviously won't sustain any sort of life.
Sing to the tune of "We're Whalers on the Moon":
There's water on the Moon
We found it with big boom
For the probe crashed down
Impacted the ground
There's water in the plume!
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
The governments first step in indtroducing the reality that alien life is extremely prevalent in our universe. Of course people in the government and illuminatist groups with Cosmic top secret clearance have known this for at least 70 years.
Yes there is water on the moon, yes there is life on the moon, and yes there are bases on the moon.
I highly reccomend everyone watch Moon Rising by Jose Escamilla with an open mind and accept the reality of what is going on at the moon.
Now she has water to sail on....
Next up, Whalers on the Moon.
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
Am I the only one who read that as NASA's MACROSS Mission?
They already found water on Mars a few years ago and posted on their website:
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/image/0504/WaterOnMars2_gcc_big.jpg
"The concentration and distribution of water and other substances requires further analysis..."
Translation: More Explosions.
$10000 Evian Moon Mineral Water: A little bit of NASA in every drop.
Are the voices in my head bothering you?
As Zort sat looking at the stars a shiny object grew larger. From the shade of the crater he sipped from his water bottle wondering what to growing object was? Slowly he could make out the letters L-C-R-O-S-S on it's metal surface.
I've no background and little education in this area but I do have an off the wall question. I have some understanding of the theory describing the initial impact from which the moon is thought to have come, and, the attendant theory that the formation of the moon may have been one of the first, big contingent happenings that drove the development of life on earth. My question centres on the material that made up the body that smashed into the early earth, added much to the earth's "girth" and gave us the present moon. Is it possible the impacting body was composed of a lot of water? There's questions surrounding how earth came to have so much water. If the impacting body that gave us the moon contained a great amount of water, the impact, formation of the moon, water on earth and the early evolution of life comes into focus as a "just so" story.
just my loose change
ideopath @ play
The dominant paradigm since the Apollo Missions was that the Moon was as dry as a bone.
However, a paper was put out recently (before the discovery of water a month ago) proposing a model for water and other volatiles venting out of the interior of the Moon. One of the predictions of this model is that there should be significant subsurface water primarily near the poles. The results from Chandrayaan-1 and LCROSS today confirms that this is true--there is significant subsurface water near the poles. The claims that the water is solely on the surface and due to cometary deposition or solar wind interactions are now blown "out of the water".
This model predicts a lot more water under the surface for potential use in human exploration. w00t!
Check out the paper here: http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/0909.3832
I drink to prepare for a fight; tonight I'm very prepared. -Soda Popinksi
Interesting paper. After seeing page 39 I now have an image of moon farts locked in my mind. "Transient
Lunar Phenomena" indeed.
It seems like they are saying 'find the largest sources of outgassing and you will find the highest concentrations of water' (at the poles), caused by vapor phase changing to subsurface ice.
FTFA: "Along with the water in Cabeus, there are hints of other intriguing substances."
Hydrocarbons?
Amino acids?
Radium?
Base on the moon!
How did it get there? Secret data. Pictures of the Moon. Secret Data, never before outside the Kremlin. Man’s first base on the Moon.
Bow-ties are cool.
The value of experience and exploration is not judged from the present, holmes. We build the first one on the moon so we learn as many of the painful lessons up front as we can, in a location that's relatively easy to access.
I'm sure there would be no shortage of painful lessons for us if we tried establishing a permanent presence on the Moon. The point is, we don't actually need to relearn those lessons, despite the alluring glow of the promise of pain that would be involved.
At present, with the monumental cost and low yield, it would be foolish to try to establish a semi-permanent presence on the Moon.
Bow-ties are cool.
how much has been spent building religious monuments and buildings? what is gained fom the expenditure?
not everything in life is an actuarial table that decides what to do with your time. some goals promise upfront 0% capital return, yet are perfectly acceptable. because the return on the investment is abstract
why spend your weekend mountain climbing? all that time, money, and risk.. for a renewed sense of self
so why go to the moon?
maybe because there's something in us yearning to get off earth? worth quadrillions of dollars? sure, why not. what else is there to spend all the money on? mansions and nice cars get boring after awhile
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I don't want to disparage the NASA scientists, I think they know what they're doing. Well then how do they distinguish between the plume from resident ices and possible unburned LOX/LH2 (which makes water by good old fashioned chemistry)? Also ice build up on vessel.
This is manned space exploration and colonization we're talking about here...brand new territory. In the early stages, it's going to be expensive, and it's prolly gonna REALLY suck for somebody. But the money exists, and so do those willing to take the risks. Or perhaps we should limit the human race by keeping it Earthbound because the economic gains aren't immediate and the people who signed up knowing the danger might die. Life might be 99% safe bets and cheap thrills, but that ain't the shit that makes history a good read.
I hear there's vast supplies of Unobtainium, Neverfindium and Nanananaimgettingpaidforthissium to be found on the moon.
CHEESE AFTER ALL~!
I KNEW IT~!
Herge , author of Tintin wrote a pair of books called " Objectif Lune " and " On a marche sur la Lune .. this is a great experiment and a great success
about 50 years ago.In the second book there is a fantastic scene where in orger to get his dog Milou
back from a cave , Tintin and the Captain go in and Tintin slides down a slope made out of ice simply
declaring that it was proof that at some point the Moon had water.
More recently we had theories abounding that the moon could have had water before it hit Earth.
All the same
BTW in the first book , they show blueprints for their rocket to the moon. .. there's no toilets :)
Details are quite fantastic , but for one
Oh well ..
This is manned space exploration and colonization we're talking about here...brand new territory. In the early stages, it's going to be expensive, and it's prolly gonna REALLY suck for somebody. But the money exists, and so do those willing to take the risks. Or perhaps we should limit the human race by keeping it Earthbound because the economic gains aren't immediate and the people who signed up knowing the danger might die. Life might be 99% safe bets and cheap thrills, but that ain't the shit that makes history a good read.
Seems like a false dichotomy: either we stick our heads in the sand and negate any possibility of exploring the universe, or we charge ahead madly into the unknown, pushing ourselves to feats for which we're not actually ready... The thing is, technology is moving forward regardless of whether we go on this mad crusade of yours or not. Material science advances, computer technology advances, every thing we've ever learned to do, we're on a regular basis learning to do it better. And meanwhile, as we're doing all this "boring" stuff like launching satellites into orbit, we're learning to do that better, too. Taking on a massive undertaking like a permanent lunar station would be a lot more sensible when the requisite technology is ready.
It would be a massive feat to get a lunar station established. To go a step further and make that station largely self-sustaining may not even be possible at present. We could spend trillions of dollars to get the place up and running and then trillions more sending rockets up every few days to resupply anyone fool enough to go there... And, for what? To build a base whose yield will never match the investment? To build a base which will be embarassingly obsolete in 20 years' time? What if, instead of investing all that money into trying to rush ahead and build that junk now, we invested that money into developing the technology that would get us a really good moon base in 100 years or so? That may not sound like a cool way to proceed at present - but 100 years from now, or whenever the technology is truly ready to exploit the moon - it's going to be the folks to prepared for that time who benefit. Those who got there first will have nothing but bragging rights.
Bow-ties are cool.
Another explanation for the '100 kg' of observed water could have been residual cryogenic propellants (LOX, LH2) in the Centaur impactor upper stage. It would be terribly convenient if 'someone' forgot to vent the stage well prior to impact. Viola! All the instant water you need post impact. Can anyone find a citation where NASA vented the stage?
What this means is my Lunar Real Estate (http://www.lunarregistry.com) is worth loads of money!! Eat your hearts out earthlings, I'll be moving to my big hacienda in the sky!
"If the water that was formed or deposited is billions of years old, these polar cold traps could hold a key to the history and evolution of the solar system, much as an ice core sample taken on Earth reveals ancient data"
Well, it did, until the single remaining billion-year-old ice sculpture of the progenitors was obliterated by a falling rocket.
The high cost to the human race's colonisation of space, is caused by the
complexity and danger of reaching escape velocity within the atmosphere,
whilst lifting the fuel with which this is achieved from the surface of the
earth.
There is another route - we can reach the edge of space safely and relatively
cheaply no problem, Burt Rutan proved this with 'Space Ship One' when he won
the 'X' prize by reaching over 100 km high, twice in one week.
My idea is, to create rocket fuel on the moon by splitting the water
discovered there, into oxygen and hydrogen using solar energy, then use that
rocket fuel to fuel a space tug, place the space tug in orbit around the
earth, slow down the space tug using moon fuel, attach the space tug to 'Space
Ship One' then using the space tug, accelerate the whole kit and caboodle from
the edge of space, to escape velocity and orbit, safely in the vacuum of
space.
If we can control robots millions of miles away on mars, I'm fairly sure we
could control water extraction plants on the moon.
Another potential source of rocket fuel on the moon, is the large amounts of
aluminium present in moon rock, aluminium burns in the presence of oxygen,
moon rock is around 40% oxygen.
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