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NASA Finds Major Ice Source In Moon Crater
coondoggie writes with news that a NASA survey of the moon's Shackleton crater by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has provided data indicating as much as 22% of the crater's surface may be covered in ice.
"The team of NASA and university scientists using laser light from LRO's laser altimeter examined the floor of Shackleton crater. They found the crater's floor is brighter than those of other nearby craters, which is consistent with the presence of small amounts of ice. ... The spacecraft mapped Shackleton crater with unprecedented detail, using a laser to illuminate the crater's interior and measure its albedo or natural reflectance. The laser light measures to a depth comparable to its wavelength, or about a micron. That represents a millionth of a meter, or less than one ten-thousandth of an inch. The team also used the instrument to map the relief of the crater's terrain based on the time it took for laser light to bounce back from the moon's surface. The longer it took, the lower the terrain's elevation. ... The crater, named after the Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton, is two miles deep and more than 12 miles wide. Like several craters at the moon's south pole, the small tilt of the lunar spin axis means Shackleton crater's interior is permanently dark and therefore extremely cold."
MIGHT have ice....anywhere from 0-22%....inconclusive results which suggest further study is needed to figure out where in this range it really is.
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we should shoot a water cannon at that crater and store some frozen water for later use!
"Shackleton crater's interior is permanently dark"
So that's the dark side of the moon that Pink Floyd was talking about
n/t
Isn't there ice everywhere in the solar system? What next? Big Buck Bunny lives on mars?
The Major had been missing for a week.
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
Because if there's a precious natural resource waiting to be depleted that is just irresistible.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
Just get it from there to here and we're golden.
So we know where the bar goes.
What's the next most important item? Life support?
Finally, we no longer have to send men on a hazardous trip to the arctic every time we need more ice.
I'm talking about cloning Sam Rockwell of course.
Matter of fact, it's all dark.
I remember reading up on Shackleton Crater a while back, when I was trying to write a sci-fi story (it never really got anywhere - sorry!). I needed a name for the main character, most surnames are based on either location or occupation. At the time of the story, humanity is just beginning to spread beyond the solar system, so the Moon's been inhabited for quite some time. Thus: Captain Ran fr'Shackleton (I'm also a bit of a Tolkien fan, so I tried to think about how the language will change over the next few centuries - we seem to like shortening things, so I cut a syllable out of the common cognomen "Ryan" and abbreviated "from").
Anyways...
We've long suspected that there was ice there, and several other factors made this a quite good location for a moonbase (good terrain, relatively well-explored, and a crater in general is a good idea because it will help protect against radiation). If it really does have that much ice, it might actually go from "theoretically possible" to "economically feasible" to build a moonbase.
A new mission has been funded by private parties (most notably sports team owners) to send Robert 'Bobby' Boucher Jr. to the moon to recover said water sources. Think tanks involved with the mission have stated that moon ice water is of the "highest quality H2O" and must be collected for commercial purposes.
Great, they found were the astronauts peed.
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How do they get micron accuracy from a moving platform 50km above the service ? Do they use multiple beams and compare measurements between the bottom of the crater and some point determined to be at surface level? What's the "reference" altitude they are comparing the depth to? If the laser beam has (for example) a 5 cm radius at the surface, and it's shining on a slope (or there's a grain of sand in the middle of the beam), how is that measurement recorded?
I just wish the editors would do their job and change headlines to what the article actually says;
ASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) spacecraft has returned data that indicate ice may make up as much as 22 percent of the surface material in a crater located on the moon's south pole.
They found the crater's floor is brighter than those of other nearby craters, which is consistent with the presence of small amounts of ice.
In addition to the possible evidence of ice,...
Nowhere did they state they found ice or in what quantity. As for quantity, it could be a small quantity spread over a wide area.
Shackleton is a sink for ice (i.e., it traps it there), not a source.
Astronauts won't have to bring their own snowcones.
That represents a millionth of a meter, or less than one ten-thousandth of an inch.
For those of you who are having trouble visualizing this: That's about a little more than 9 billionths of a football field (on the short number scale, of course).
It's not ice. It's white cheese...
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
How come other planets have names for their moons, but Earth's moon is just called the Moon? Same thing with the sun.
We have a very Earth-centric view of the universe.
Isn't Shackleton's Crater where the Apollo 18 crew did their filming?
I say we nuke the site from orbit, it's the only way to be sure...
Oh, wait, didn't we try something like that already... http://lcross.arc.nasa.gov/observation.htm
(yes, I know no nuclear weapons were involved)
That's probably where the Moon Nazis have their base.
| Captain Ran fr'Shackleton
Cranfrackle
Great, now we can pass that information on to the Chinese, Russians, Indians and who ever else has plans for the moon. NASA just can't stop bleeding money. They have outsourced their space program to the Russians and hope that SpaceX will put NASA stickers on the Falcon rockets. Please NASA, no more alien life headline grabbing press releases and come up with a concrete mission.
...lots of little black rocks that suddenly sprout numerous legs and scurry about, and imbed themselves under your skin.
How on earth?? Oh.. It's not on the earth, we have ice out in space, on an otherwise solid rock. I'm not understanding first how and when this water actually made it to this location. I see a serious problem here. Ice in space, even at very low temperatures, tends to turn to vapor and disappear. It may happen at very low rates when you are in the shade on the moon, but it will turn to vapor. If you stipulate that the moon is a few billion years old and the surface is largely unchanged for the last few million years, any surface ice would surely have vaporized by now.
For this reason, I'm a bit surprised to hear they think this is water. I suppose it is *possible* that some comet dropped off some of it's water in the recent past, but the moon presents a pretty small cross section to capture chunks of comments, and usually such impacts are fairly high energy affairs so even a large chunk of ice is going to leave very little.
I suppose they will have to come up with some theory to explain this, because we *all* know how old things need to be... Forget the guys that are saying 6 thousand years.... We got to have billions or this doesn't work.
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I've always been a moderately conservative/libertarian-leaning dude who supported Republicans in the past because they seemed less loony than the Dems.
No longer. The current crop of Republicans pushing for the Shuttle Contractor Pork Program (a.k.a. SLS) disgust me. They can fuck off and die as far as I'm concerned. Obama is giving SpaceX and other private firms a chance, and whatever faults Obama has, this one action is enough to deserve support.
In the grand scheme of things, it doesn't really matter whether the GOP comes into power and wastes X billion dollars on their brand of pork (defense contractors, corporations) or the Dems remain in power and waste Y billion on theirs (welfare, public employee pensions, wall street). But having allowed private space industry to blossom will change the course of history, THAT matters.
Well, I have to say that both major parties suck. I can not stand either one. The real problem is that presidents do not really make that many decisions. Most are made by the men/women that they surround themselves by. Best example, is that Griffin pushed NASA's 90's program, that the neo-cons killed. Griffin really is the one that got private space moving fast. Sadly, he just wanted it as a back-up, and never fully realized that private space is EXACTLY what is needed to stop CONgress from killing things like going BEO.
As such, I note that romney has surrounded himself with some of the worst that came out of reagan's and W's admins and no doubt will pick up more of that kind of trash. It is the LAST thing that America needs. Now, I am not a fan of O's, but I think that he is doing a better job than what the neo-cons have done to America. this is probably the best illustration of that.. Now, our biggest 2 issues are keeping the economy going, rebalancing the budget, AND stopping CONgress from being so corrupt. And yes, CONgress is CORRUPT. Horribly corrupt. All of them.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
ice in a crater??? So a really big icehole???
Ernest Shackleton was a renound Antartic polar explorer. Ring any bells. You're now allowed to know that there's ice there. It would appear that others have known for a a good deal longer.
Who has the arrogance to name a crater after an ice explorer if it's not known that it contains ice? Would Scientists do such a thing? I think not.
ice evaporates in a vacuum
Wow, did someone rewrite the laws of physics as regards the chemical properties of solid water when I wasn't looking? Goddamn, that must mean that comets don't actually exist, because they are, after all, agglomerations of dust, rock, and... wow, look at that! ice, totally exposed to the vacuum of space, and couldn't possibly survive long enough for our obviously ignorant, non-creationist "scientists" to observe them and catalog four thousand one hundred and eighty-five of them.
And I guess Jupiter's moon Europa is shot, too, because it's just so much ice and rock at what might as well be the partial vacuum of 0.1 Pa. It's incredible that our ignorant, non-creationist astronomers can still see it in their telescopes, considering that ice evaporates in a vacuum. Wow, they must have such incredible imaginations!
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