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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.
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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.
They are working hard to stop private space. They finally relented to allowed a small amount of money for 2.5 crafts, but they insist that 5x or more money flow to their jobs Bill: The Senate Launch System (SLS). Now, they are blocking NASA from helping Bigelow from getting off the ground. Yet, if Bigelow is off the ground around 2014, we will go back to the moon within 4 years or so.
.5B with over 120 tonnes to LEO. In addition, at the end of it, a new contract will be opened to pay for 5 launches per year for 4 years (2 from one and 2 from another, with a 3rd going to the lowest bidder). By doing something like this, we end up with similar launch vehicles with similar costs structures. Lose one, and we are still going.
What is needed is for us to GUT SLS on the next budget, but create a COTS II for SHLV. Then create 2 launchers of which they both get max 5B to develop it, and must launch for under
Note, that we allow the current builders of the SLS to put it up for bid. If they can do it for that cheap and that quickly, then they get the contract.
But, the real priorities must be human launch AND private space stations. That gives multiple locations, and allows us to fully test equipment in space prior to going to the moon BEFORE 2020.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
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).
NASA has been keeping it a secret for some time. They've already set up a moon base and populated the moon. Everyone just lives on the darkside of it.
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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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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