NASA Strikes Gold and Water On the Moon

tcd004 writes "The PBS NewsHour reports: there is water on the moon — along with a long list of other compounds, including mercury, gold and silver. That's according to a more detailed analysis of the cold lunar soil near the moon's South Pole. The results were released as six papers by a large team of scientists in the journal, Science Thursday. [Note: Nature's papers are behind a paywall; for a few more details, reader coondoggie points out a a story at Network World.] The data comes from the October 2009 mission, when NASA slammed a booster rocket traveling nearly 6,000 miles per hour into the moon and blasted out a hole. Trailing close behind it was a second spacecraft, rigged with a spectrometer to study the lunar plume released by the blast. The mission is called LCROSS, for Lunar Crater Observer and Sensing Satellite."

Comments

Re:cheaper mining?

[Darkness404]

A lot. First off is the fact to even send something to the moon requires a pretty big rocket, something like the Saturn V isn't cheap. Secondly, mining robots aren't hardly even used on earth, let alone on the moon. Thirdly we've found some water and some rare elements, not that we've found a lake and huge gold nuggets so we'd have to send many more missions to locate a suitable "mine".

Will we eventually mine the moon? Yes. Will it happen in the next 5 decades? Probably not and even then, the materials mined would make more sense to be used on something like a lunar colony, not for export back to Earth.

Re:Gold?

[Facegarden]

I have to wonder how much of that gold was debris from the spacecraft - plating for connections, etc. Once the thing hit, I would imagine (and I am just guessing) that the plume that resulted was pretty well mixed with well-blended spacecraft.

Oh well, with the article behind a paywall, I'm not about to find out. Nice to pay for the science - NASA - out of the taxpayers pocket, then charge us again for the results, eh?

Thanks to google, I can find it all by myself.
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/LCROSS/main/oct_21_media_telecon.html
-Taylor

Re:Gold?

[Facegarden]

The word "gold" does not appear on that page. Nor did I see anything about accounting for the metals in the spacecraft in the general sense. So I'm still in the dark. Unless there's something indirect there you expected me to follow?

Jesus christ you're lazy!

I don't know, poke around. They even list a number to call to get a rebroadcast version of the press conference:

"Media Telecon: LCROSS and LRO Science Science Results of Lunar Impact10.21.10
Date: Thursday, Oct. 21, 2010
Time: 11 a.m. PDT / 2 p.m. EDT
A replay of the teleconference will be available until Nov. 4, 2010 by dialing 888-566-0674 from within the United States, or 203-369-3084 internationally. Passcode is 6267."

You complained about not being able to access the information that we have a legal right to access freely (everything NASA does is public domain, or something like that).

I guess i figured my point went without saying, but i must have been wrong. My point was: If you look around, the information *is* available. It just might not be in the format you want. Some reporter for a newspaper sat around and listened to that press conference though, and made the data easier to get to. That paywall pays for that man's time. If you don't want to pay, NASA provides the number to call and listen yourself. Or, the other point I was trying to make, is that you could just google around. A quick search for "nasa lcross gold" brought up:
http://www.universetoday.com/76329/water-on-the-moon-and-much-much-more-latest-lcross-results/

I'm sure NASA will put the data online at some point, but people have to write reports and all that. Until then, your options are pretty clear, and I don't see any cause to complain, except to be annoying.
-Taylor

Re:Wouldn't mining the moon be a bad idea?

[PhunkySchtuff]

OK. so the mass of the moon is, oh about 7.346 x 10^22kg that's approximately 73459000000000000000 tonnes. If we extract, say, 1 million tonnes of stuff from the moon, that's about 1.3 x 10^-17 %, also known as a poofteenth of a percent.
According to my calculations, this will be enough to move the moon closer to us by about 4.76 x 10^-11 metres or approximately the diameter of a hydrogen atom.

Gold is pretty much worthless outside earth.

[Ihlosi]

In space, it becomes just yet another metal, and not a particularly useful one at that (as opposed to things like silver, platinum, palladium, etc). And transporting the stuff back to Earth would be more expensive than its value, and hence quite uneconomical.

Re:Gold?

[Foobar of Borg]

Scientists are humans too - they have an interest in publishing positive results, so they might ignored some inconvenient facts - worth checking.

And when someone else determines that the "positive results" are hogwash, they are shown to be a bunch of fools and lose their valuable reputation.

Funny how this whole "peer review" thing works.