Slashdot Mirror
NASA Estimates 600 Million Metric Tons of Water Ice At Moon's North Pole
After analyzing data from a radar device aboard last year's Indian Chandrayaan-1 mission to the Moon, NASA scientists have found what they estimate to be 600 million metric tons of water ice in craters around the Moon's north pole.
"Numerous craters near the poles of the Moon have interiors that are in permanent sun shadow. These areas are very cold and water ice is stable there essentially indefinitely. Fresh craters show high degrees of surface roughness (high circular polarization ratio) both inside and outside the crater rim, caused by sharp rocks and block fields that are distributed over the entire crater area. However, Mini-SAR has found craters near the north pole that have high CPR inside, but not outside their rims. This relation suggests that the high CPR is not caused by roughness, but by some material that is restricted within the interiors of these craters. We interpret this relation as consistent with water ice present in these craters. The ice must be relatively pure and at least a couple of meters thick to give this signature."
Having been a Heinlein fan for the last 30 or so years, I have to say this makes me happy inside.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
How many Olympic swimming pools is that?
1,267,327,975,003 pints of beer.
Solids need to be measured in Volkswagen beetles.
Sweet informative mod.
This is great. Now all we need is oxygen and we can live there. Hmmm..... O2 from electrolysis of water, powered by solar?
Sounds like it might now be vastly easier to establish a self-sustaining moon colony.
Those are my principles, and if you don't like them... well, I have others.
Hey, aren't you one of those Greypeace fanatics?
Ezekiel 23:20
It's a big rock floating through vacuum. What is there to preserve? There's no ecosystem, no history, no emotional attachment. The only reason I can think of not to use it is that once it's used up, then it's gone, and if you think of an even better way to use it later then it's too late.
Presuming that somebody is going to the Moon anyway, the cost of getting a kilo of water there is of the order of tens of thousands of dollars. Digging a kilo up in-situ, if it's handy, costs very little indeed. That's the point. It's like finding a bunch of ready cut diamond rings lying around, as opposed to having to build a strip mine, excavate them and cut them, mine the gold for the ring, smelt it, make a ring, and mount the diamond.
Please consider this account deleted, I just can't be bothered with the spam anymore.
I guess it would have been after 1972, because I'd like to think that NASA would have sent some Apollo astronauts to collect some ice samples while they still had the chance. Or was it always known, theoretically, and for whatever reason they decided it could wait, as everyone assumed that if Apollo 21 didn't get around to it, Apollo 86 would.
Sigh. I really miss those days.
At least RTFS!
"After analyzing data from a radar device aboard last year's Indian Chandrayaan-1"
Chandrayaan-1 only went up a year and a half ago, so yes, this was figured out after 1972.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
Why would you need to extract water from the prisoners? You're getting labor out of them, so they have far more value alive. When they die, certainly, there's much to reuse -- but "returning to the soil" (as water and fertilizer) has a great deal of precedence, so I hardly see why it would be objectionable.
As for it being an open system, quite true -- the discovery that the readily available water would run out and they'd find themselves starving in less than a decade was a key factor in Heinlein's prisoners' revolt.
Pardon? Set up a self-sustaining economy (water and energy being the two ongoing inputs -- the former being a limited natural resource on the moon and the latter being easy to generate) and the prisoners can feed themselves using the food they grow and water they mine, raise families, build more tunnels as-needed for additional living space, and otherwise provide for themselves. There's a bit of handwaving here regarding availability of other plant nutrients -- would need to do research on composition of moon rocks and cost to import any materials which aren't locally available -- but inasmuch as we're limiting our discussion to water, I don't see the feasibility concerns.
Obama cancels the plans to return to the moon and about a month later vast quantities of water are suddenly discovered on the moon.
You seem to have a common misconception: NASA only cancelled Constellation, which was a horribly overbudget and behind schedule program designed to build two new rockets which wouldn't have been able to take people to the Moon until sometime in the late 2030s. The newly announced program boosts NASA's budget, and places an emphasis on lowering the cost of spaceflight to LEO and building the technologies needed for sustainable beyond-Earth exploration.
In situ resource utilization (e.g. lunar ice extraction) is one of the new technologies emphasized in the new plans. The old Constellation plans largely defunded this kind of research, as the funds were needed to help prevent the rocket building from getting further behind schedule. The new plans call for a near-term in-space resource extraction demonstrator:
http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/428356main_Exploration.pdf
Flagship Technology Demonstrations
Projects selected as in-space, flagship demonstrations will be significant in scale, and offer high potential to demonstrate new capability and reduce the cost of future exploration missions. These missions will demonstrate such critical technologies as in-orbit propellant transfer and storage, inflatable modules, automated/autonomous rendezvous and docking, closed-loop life support systems, and other next generation capabilities key to sustainably exploring deep space.
In FY 2011, NASA will initiate several Flagship Technology Demonstrators, each with an expected lifecycle cost in the $400 million to $1 billion range, over a lifetime of five years or less, with the first flying no later than 2014. In pursuit of these goals, international, commercial, and other government agency partners will be actively pursued as integrated team members where appropriate. ...
In FY 2011, NASA will initiate demonstration projects in the areas of in situ resource utilization (ISRU), autonomous precision landing and hazard avoidance, and advanced in-space propulsion, leading to demonstrations on either robotic precursor or flagship missions.
In Situ Resource Utilization: NASA will fund research in a variety of ISRU activities aimed at using lunar, asteroidal, and Martian materials to produce oxygen and extract water from ice reservoirs. A flight experiment to demonstrate lunar resource prospecting, characterization, and extraction will be considered for testing on a future Flagship Technology Demonstration or robotic precursor exploration mission. Concepts to produce fuel, oxygen, and water from the Martian atmosphere and from subsurface ice will also be explored.
NASA's plans also call for propellant depots in low-Earth orbit, and likely EML-1, a Lagrange point which allows relatively easy access to the Moon, Near-Earth Asteroids, and Mars. Once lunar ice extraction is demonstrated and an EML-1 propellant depot is established, a natural progression is to have automated processing plants on the Moon produce H2 and O2 fuel from lunar ice, which can then get shipped up to the EML-1 depot making access to the inner solar system much easier. The old plan suppressed this sort of research in favor of in-house rocket-building, while the new plan enables sustainable space exploration.
What other purposes? I've never seen any convincing rationale for wanting to settle the moon. But let's dispose of some rejoinders right up front, shall we?
Look, I read all the Heinlein books too. They were great. And colonizing space would be really cool. But there has to be some kind of economically feasible way to do it, and there just isn't.