NASA Briefs Preliminary Plume Findings from Moon Mission |
NASA Briefs Preliminary Plume Findings from Moon Mission |
Nov 10 2009, 09:26 PM
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Member Group: Members Posts: 239 Joined: 18-December 07 From: New York Member No.: 3982 |
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Nov 15 2009, 04:41 AM
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Member Group: Members Posts: 214 Joined: 30-December 05 Member No.: 628 |
Regarding the comparison of water to gold, remember that on the moon, water will be needed in much greater quantities than gold. This applies whether the need is for human consumption or, broken into its elemental components, as a fuel source. In the lunar environment, water would be more difficult to process than gold in one important respect - the gold wouldn't need to be constantly confined to prevent its escape to the vacuum of space. Any attempt to set up shop and utilize trace amounts of lunar water will have to invest heavily just in thermal insulation alone, otherwise those trace amounts are going to prove very difficult to corner. Remember those discarded Russian RTG's in Georgia that were located in the wintertime by hunters because they were surrounded by large circles of snow-free terrain? It's pretty hard to do industrial-scale work without generating waste heat, and at the local temperatures and vapor pressures prevailing in Cabeus, a little waste heat will quickly disrupt the delicate environmental balance that trapped the water in the first place.
This mission has told us a lot we didn't know. I'm intrigued by what these deposits can teach us when we determine where the water came from, and this should be answerable either by further work on the LCROSS data set or with some sort of sample return mission. But to significantly lower the costs of exploration we need at least a recognizable "dirty snowfield," not the Atacama desert. |
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