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NASA Strikes Gold and Water On the Moon

Posted by timothy on from the moon-is-a-moist-mistress dept.

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."

4 of 421 comments (clear)

  1. cheaper mining? by ddxexex · · Score: 4, Interesting

    If you don't have to worry about the environment on the moon, how much gold (or rare earth metals or whatever) do you need to make a robotic lunar mining mission viable?

    1. Re:cheaper mining? by Iron+Condor · · Score: 4, Interesting

      What AC said above: even if Moon was solid, 24k gold, it'd not make economical sense to mine it there. End of story.

      No, not end of story by a long shot.

      Mining gold on the moon makes economic sense exactly if it results in gain in excess of the original investment. How many dollars can you charge for an ounce of, not gold, but gold from the moon? The gold market is already based strictly on what people think is valuable. The price of gold has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the price of mining gold.

      Does it even have to be gold? How about a speck of genuine moon rock (in a nice clear plastic cast) - yours for only ... $59.99? How many slashdotters would buy such a thing? What would it cost to get, say, a couple kg of that back to earth? A billion dollars? That's the price of a nice oil rig. In other words: that's the kind of money that is already available and people are already expending it because they expect a decent return on that investment.

      You may want to be just a shade more careful with calling things economically infeasable.

      --
      We're all born with nothing.
      If you die in debt, you're ahead.
  2. Re:I can see it now... by amicusNYCL · · Score: 4, Interesting

    It really wouldn't matter if there were miners trapped on the moon. We would just shut them down and build a few new ones, or probably have reserves on standby. Maybe we could recover them for parts when it's convenient.

    Or were you assuming humans would be doing the mining?

    --
    "Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
  3. Who has the mine rights? The us? USSR? China? NASA by Joe+The+Dragon · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Who has the mine rights? The us? USSR? China? NASA it self? Neil Armstrong?