Water on the Moon, Data from multiple missions seems to indicate... Options

[Juramike]

This probably deserves it's own thread. Seems the evidence is not specific to only one mission...

space.com article: http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/0909...-discovery.html

[imipak]

The solar wind aetiology is certainly interesting, but practical just doesn't come into it.

Apart from the basic arithmetic about theoretical water yield per square meter and energy required to extract it Doug provided, what would such a vehicle look like? Here's an approximate terrestrial analogue, running at a few km/h, taking the top inch or two of a surface and dumping it harvester-style into a following tender (note: no further processing happens at this stage.) These things mass in the order of 20-30 tons, and of course need regular teardown maintenance and rebuild (neglecting the tender and other supporting infrastructure.) What would a soft-landing of a self-repairing, self-powered, autonomous version of such a machine on the moon look like, as a back-of-a-fag-packet concept?

Mars, on the other hand,.. is another thread

[Fran Ontanaya]

As a curiousity, would water ice survive a lunar day inside the descent stage of the Apollo Lunar Module?