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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."
Twas a Miner 2049'er, and his daughter, Clementine!
She tripped and fell out an airlock.
Miners trapped in mine collapse on the moon...
And I thought the miners in South America had it rough waiting for rescue.
Last I checked, none of mercury, gold or silver was a compound...
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?
Call Yukon Cornelius!
The moon men announced that they are diplomatically officially in a "huff" with the Earth, and that no rare Earth metals would be shipped from the Moon to the Earth.
Off the record, sources close to the moon men said, "Get your own damn rare metals from your own planet!"
Sources to close for comfort to NASA officials have commented, "Do we have to bomb the Moon again, until they get it?"
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
This is a great discovery, but what are we going to do with it? The obvious thing is to mine it out, but wouldn't lightening the mass of the moon have a (probably quite bad) effect on it's tidal effects to the earth?
Water? Gold? Silver? Why have we not brought democracy to the moon yet?
It seems to me that everything that you can find on the moon (or in asteroids for that matter) can be found here on earth in similar quantities and accessed more inexpensively, probably by a factor of 1/1,000,000 or so.
Sure, building your starship construction facility on the moon has advantages, ok, one advantage, that of 1/10 the gravity of earth, but honestly is it really cheaper to build something there rather than just do it on earth? Sure it would cost a lot more to launch stuff out of Earth's gravity well, but is it so much more expensive that it justifies the cost of learning how to do all this stuff on the moon?
You tell me what you want to do on the moon and I'll tell you how to do it faster and cheaper here on Earth.
There are lots of fun reasons to explore space (and maybe even the moon) but not for silver mining (and spaceport construction).
I know people get all romantic about human space flight, but personally I'd say send the robots until we find something worth visiting in person. They're better at the job.
G.
We all know that the moon is not in fact made out of green cheese. But what if it were made of barbeque spare ribs? Would ya eat it then? I know I would. Heck, I'd have seconds, and then polish it off with a cool Budweiser.
The teachers will crack any minute, purple monkey dishwasher.
But we haven't even been back to the moon despite it being easier to do than in the 60s.
You're basically correct but the reason we're not back on the moon has little to do with electronics and lots to do with the fact that physics hasn't changed much in those 38 years. Gravity sucks.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
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
Worldwide Military budgets: $2100 billion. Worldwide Space Exploration budgets: $38 billion. Really, world? Really?
Who has the mine rights? The us? USSR? China? NASA it self? Neil Armstrong?
Is there any amount of materials on the moon that would make it profitable for a company to build the capability to mine it and ship material back to earth? I'm not sure there is. Lets say you found a boulder of gold that weighed three tons. A solid nugget. What are the costs associated with recovering that nugget? Now, realizing that they won't find that, but instead ore and other materials that need processing, there are additional considerations: Do you pay for the shipping weight of ore, or do you pay to process the ore on the moon and ship the material? If you process it on the moon, how do you handle the additional maintenance and engineering requirements?
I didn't RTFA, but just seeing that valuable materials on the moon made me question how valuable ANYTHING is when you have to pay so much per unit of weight to retrieve it. Maybe Chuck Norris' cancer-curing tears, if they were found on the moon. But I can't think of much else.
We better get on this. We must not allow a mineshaft gap!
No wai! Cold ribs are blech, and rewarmed arn't much better
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo.
Liberate Titan!
Help stamp out iliturcy.
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
Worldwide Military budgets: $2100 billion. Worldwide Space Exploration budgets: $38 billion. Really, world? Really?
Mercury, gold, silver, ..
Jesus christ you're lazy!
That's OK; he's a lot smarter than the science team who are clearly morons for not once taking into account their own spacecraft parts during the years it took to put the program together.
Obviously the moon contains (actially, consists of) minerals. It wouldn't be there otherwise. Especially seeing as it was a large chunk broken off from Earth a few billion years ago. And sure, earth has been supplemented by asteroids since then, but so has the moon. So the question is not really "Does the moon have minerals?" but more a matter of "How much can we expect to find on the surface?".
Gold and silver are somewhat financially valuable to us now. But from what I understand, they are also relatively common. I suspect the reports highlight gold and silver because that's language that beancounters who pay for the space programs understand. But there are far more valuable resources that we'll desparately need in 25-75 years time.
So, more importantly... because lacking in rare earth minerals could stymie advancements in technology...
What "rare earth" minerals might be "common moon" minerals?
See, it's all nice to go misty eyed, chest out, with the Federation flag flapping in the wind behind you about space colonisation but think of it this way. We are living at the bottom of a deep and steep (gravitational) cliff, though generally, it is pleasant here and we (still) have what we need. The Moon/Mars/Alpha Centauri, with all its riches, gold and hot green women is on top of this cliff. Why should we have to expend money and energy to climb this cliff, to get stuff that we can easier get down here? Factor in the cost of going to the moon, mining it and transporting it back to Earth, it is probably more economical to extract gold from sea water. I'm not saying space colonisation will never happen. It could happen. But then again, I have a dim view of our chances. Also, there is no soil on the moon. In fact, moon dust is very abrasive and would be very hazardous to humans and our machinery.
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.
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.
Similar to the upcoming US election results