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: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: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.