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Unmanned Spaceflight.com _ Lunar Exploration _ Water on the Moon

Posted by: Juramike Sep 24 2009, 12:23 AM

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/090923-moon-water-discovery.html

Posted by: belleraphon1 Sep 24 2009, 01:10 AM

From the AP

"Three different space probes found the chemical signature of water all over the moon's surface, surprising the scientists who at first doubted the unexpected measurement until it was confirmed independently and repeatedly."

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hLBM9BvkGLquVcjYI96_y2mQs6OgD9AT9B4O1

Craig

Posted by: ElkGroveDan Sep 24 2009, 02:56 AM

I'd say the timing is now ripe for another announced discovery of water on Mars. rolleyes.gif

Posted by: elakdawalla Sep 24 2009, 03:55 AM

There are two more papers, one by Sunshine et al from Deep Impact, and very short one by Roger Clark from Cassini. All find the same 3-micron feature indicating the presence of H20 or OH, but not surprisingly all have slightly different takes on the significance (though I should note Clark is the 3rd author on the Pieters paper).

--Emily

Posted by: Astro0 Sep 24 2009, 04:03 AM

Dan, We've had the "water on Mars" line so many times now, I think it deserves its own icon. smile.gif

EDIT: Please note that I decided to pull the link to the Water on the Moon story.

Posted by: centsworth_II Sep 24 2009, 04:18 AM

QUOTE (ElkGroveDan @ Sep 23 2009, 09:56 PM) *
I'd say the timing is now ripe for another announced discovery of water on Mars.
I would compare water discoveries on Mars to oil discoveries on Earth. We know there is water on Mars, but that doesn't mean that new discoveries, whether in location or extent, are not big news.

Posted by: nprev Sep 24 2009, 04:22 AM

laugh.gif ...killer, Astro0!

Suspect that this will all prove to be of minerological rather than practical interest after the dust settles; it really ain't a lot of water. The possiblity of endogenous origin via solar wind interaction with the soil is fascinating, though.

Posted by: ElkGroveDan Sep 24 2009, 05:09 AM

QUOTE (centsworth_II @ Sep 23 2009, 09:18 PM) *
I would compare water discoveries on Mars to oil discoveries on Earth. We know there is water on Mars, but that doesn't mean that new discoveries, whether in location or extent, are not big news.


Yes, but the oil companies don't send out press releases with every discovery that breathlessly announce: "The long suspected existence of oil on Earth has finally been confirmed."

Posted by: centsworth_II Sep 24 2009, 05:20 AM

QUOTE (ElkGroveDan @ Sep 24 2009, 01:09 AM) *
...press releases with every discovery...

I think a mistake commonly made here is to concentrate on sensational headlines that are not part of the press release rather than the release itself which usually puts the story in perspective.

Posted by: Doc Sep 24 2009, 12:02 PM

According to SpaceRef.com, NASA hadn't yet released Cassini data from the flyby of 1999 until now it seems. Has anyone noticed this?
This reminds me of the Phoenix conundrum of last year.

Posted by: djellison Sep 24 2009, 12:35 PM

I can only find ISS data from Cassini for the earth flyby - nothing from any other instrument (using http://starbrite.jpl.nasa.gov/ ) so working on the assumption that this is VIMS or CIRS data -then yup - it's not been in the PDS.

I'm finding it hard to get excited about this. We're talking about something two to three times, possibly 30 times drier, than dry concrete - and even then - if I'm not misreading stuff, just in the top few mm of the regolith is this 'damp' (BBC's choice of word there)

So you might get a few tens of tons of water out of ploughing through an entire square km of surface. I'm struggling to imagine that as being useful for, err, anything.

It may well be that this surface smattering of H+O is all there is to the water on the moon story (given the none too positive results from radar mapping of the moons poles) - so I'm going to stick my neck out and predict a very dry LCROSS event.

Posted by: remcook Sep 24 2009, 01:12 PM

It must be VIMS data.
I could be very wrong, but from the few articles on this I've seen this means that the dark craters get more water input than thought, so there could be a lot more there (??). The press conference will address some of these things I'm sure. I find it hard to judge what they exactly saw where.

Posted by: elakdawalla Sep 24 2009, 01:41 PM

It is VIMS data, and it is in the PDS. One problem is that the Clark paper seems to have given the wrong date for the data he shows -- he said August 19, it was August 18. Do a search here: http://pds-imaging.jpl.nasa.gov/search/search.html for VIMS data on August 18, 1999 and toward the bottom of the results page you'll see the lunar stuff. An example browse image is attached. It's fairly low resolution. I'm looking for anyone who can turn this stuff into a pretty natural color view.

 

Posted by: Phil Stooke Sep 24 2009, 01:53 PM

I'm giving up on predicting anything - well, except the stock market.

Phil

Posted by: Doc Sep 24 2009, 02:30 PM

Might be safe to say that this discovery could be used to explain the wierd distribution of the hydrogen detected by LRO.

Posted by: elakdawalla Sep 24 2009, 03:09 PM

Hey, Gordan pointed out to me that he already played with that data:
http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.php?showtopic=3171&view=findpost&p=68698



Thanks Gordan!

Posted by: Zvezdichko Sep 24 2009, 03:14 PM

http://www.isro.org/news/scripts/Sep24_2009.aspx

ISRO was the first agency to officially announce the finding

Posted by: ugordan Sep 24 2009, 04:46 PM

I revisited the IR channels from the same 4 source cubes the above natural color stack is comprised of, here's a quick-n-dirty (hopefully) calibrated false color image showing 3.86 (apparently an absorption band), 2.98 and 2.00 microns as red, green and blue respectively. The version on the right was balanced to make each wavelength similarly bright. Magnified 8x.


Posted by: volcanopele Sep 24 2009, 05:45 PM

Interesting finding. A similar absorption band at 3.15 microns was found on Io by NIMS both at a low background level, and in small concentrations. At the time, it was suggested that water (or hydrated minerals) arrived on Io either through cometary impacts or from Io volcanic activity, but now I wonder if charged particles in Jupiter's magnetic field could do something similar on Io to what these particles in the solar wind are apparently doing on the Moon (maybe with cometary impacts to explain the local concentrations).

http://gishbar.blogspot.com/2009/09/water-on-dry-worlds.html

Posted by: djellison Sep 24 2009, 05:47 PM

QUOTE (Zvezdichko @ Sep 24 2009, 04:14 PM) *
http://www.isro.org/news/scripts/Sep24_2009.aspx

ISRO was the first agency to officially announce the finding


And thus officially, still breach the embargo which doesn't expire for another 15 minutes.
rolleyes.gif


Posted by: centsworth_II Sep 24 2009, 05:49 PM

QUOTE (djellison @ Sep 24 2009, 07:35 AM) *
...you might get a few tens of tons of water out of ploughing through an entire square km of surface. I'm struggling to imagine that as being useful for, err, anything.
I guess it depends on whether sucking the water from a square km of lunar surface or shipping it there from Earth is more cost effective.

Posted by: elakdawalla Sep 24 2009, 05:58 PM

QUOTE (djellison @ Sep 24 2009, 09:47 AM) *
And thus officially, still breach the embargo which doesn't expire for another 15 minutes.
rolleyes.gif

No, Science lifted the embargo. However it is pretty bad form for them to issue their release before the briefing was to start.

Posted by: Zvezdichko Sep 24 2009, 06:06 PM

Scientist: The Moon is very dry. If we have to extract all the water from Apollo's rocks, we will fill this spoon. The general idea is that the Moon is bone dry, but there may be water in shadowed regions.

Three papers will be published today. Three major instruments - M3, Visual and IR mapping spectrometer- Cassini, the third - Hi-res imaging spectrometer aboard Deep Impact (EPOXI).

These instruments made possible the water on the Moon to be mapped as it was never mapped before.

...

Widespread water was detected on the surface of the Moon.

Now we see a map of the distribution of OH and H2O on the Moon

EDIT

http://www.nasa.gov/topics/moonmars/features/moon20090924.html

Presented on NASA's website

Posted by: Zvezdichko Sep 24 2009, 06:15 PM

http://img210.imageshack.us/i/conference24sep095.png/

A crater and one of the charts which shows water presence

EDIT: We see just the preliminary results from M3. The data is continued to be analyzed.

EDIT2: Water and OH- exist on all latitudes of the Moon.

http://img410.imageshack.us/i/conference24sep098.png/

Now a comparison between VIMS and M3

EDIT 3: All graphics and images were uploaded on NASA's website. No more uploading here.

EDIT 4: Even dry deserts on the Moon have more water than the Lunar (polar) craters

Now switching to phone calls

Posted by: djellison Sep 24 2009, 06:48 PM

QUOTE (elakdawalla @ Sep 24 2009, 06:58 PM) *
No, Science lifted the embargo.


Ahhh - ok. I guess they didn't have much choice really.

Posted by: Zvezdichko Sep 24 2009, 06:51 PM

Looks like they did it after the information leaked in the press.

biggrin.gif

Well, this is an amazing discovery. A spoon of lunar water versus pools of martian water smile.gif Despite this, it's exciting!

Congrats all!

Posted by: Greg Hullender Sep 24 2009, 07:14 PM

QUOTE (centsworth_II @ Sep 24 2009, 09:49 AM) *
I guess it depends on whether sucking the water from a square km of lunar surface or shipping it there from Earth is more cost effective.

Given it only has to process the top cm of regolith, I figure an unmanned harvester with a 1m-wide scoop could process 3.4 square km per month if it moved at 5km/hr. If we take the estimate of 1L water per cubic meter of regolith, that'd be 34 metric tons of water per month or about 400 tons per year. If the point is to fuel rockets, that'd be about enough for a Falcon-1-sized launch per month. That's not too shabby.

Note also that if the source of water really is the solar wind, then this resource is renewable. I think that's pretty exciting.

--Greg (Please tell me I haven't misplaced a decimal point) :-)

Posted by: djellison Sep 24 2009, 07:26 PM

QUOTE (Zvezdichko @ Sep 24 2009, 07:51 PM) *
pools of martian water


About as appropriate a word as the BBC saying "Damp" for the new moon discovery. ph34r.gif

Posted by: Phil Stooke Sep 24 2009, 07:43 PM

One litre per cubic metre... that sounds way too much, but it's pretty hard to get a handle on amounts here. 5 km/hour - can we extract the water molecules as fast as we can drive? That might be the limiting factor.

I'm not trying to sound too negative here, but I'm not convinced we could use the water that is being described at low latitudes. But concentrate it in cold traps, and I could see that being useful.

Phil

Posted by: djellison Sep 24 2009, 08:39 PM

Like Greg - I'll say up front, I hope I've not screwed up any decimal places here.....

1kg of water per m^3 of soil.

They said figures like 1mm, 2mm, a few mm. I'll go with 2mm.

Thus - 1000 x 1000 x .002 m (i.e. farming 1 sq km) - is 2,000 kg of water.

Looking at something like the Mars Direct ISRO numbers - taking 8T of H2 and working with in-situ CO2 to make methane and O2. - 8T of H2 as water would be a further 64T of O2 - for a total of 72T of equivalent water, as it were.

That's 36 sqkm of farming, or, from a landing site - every scrap of surface regolith to a radius of 3.4km


Alternatively - taken an MSL sized rover - with some sort of soil harvesting combine harvester style rig on front - shall we say 3 x 1m wide grabbers ( like a big gang-lawn mower).

It would have to travel a total of 12,000km of 3m wide stripes to cover 36 sqkm. Quite by chance - that's about 1000km further than a circumnavigation of the whole moon.

At a brisk rover of, say 2.5m/sec (just over 5mph) - operating a 50% duty cycle for the day/night cycle - 110 days. But of course, you can't have a rover that just end up dragging a 70 ton sack - it'll have to get it bit, return it to be stored, go get some more, return it. Say you farm a 6km square, and can get one 3m x 6,000m stripe in one 'store'. It would be an average drive out of 3km, an average drive back from the end of 6.7km. Plus farming of 6km. 2000 times - 31,400km. Basically - a year of driving.

Harvesting at that higher figure, though, of 2.5m/sec - perhaps taking the top cm of soil (can't imagine how you'd take the top 2mm) - and a regolith density of 2.9g/cm^3 - that, amazingly, is 4.5 CuM or 13 tons of regolith per minute, producing (as only 1/5th of our 1cm harvest is 1% water) basically, 1 litre per minute.

I have no idea what sort of energy will be involved in getting that water out. Latent heat of vaporization is 2257 kJ/kg - 37 kWatts of energy required. (330x the RTG power of MSL, or a solar array about 9x9m at 30% effic)

As a comparison - to get 72,000kg of water up at Phoenix's landing site - taking, say, 30cm trough, at 500kg / m^3, at 3m wide, is only 160km of trough - 75x less than the lunar combine harvester.

QUOTE (Phil Stooke @ Sep 24 2009, 08:43 PM) *
I'm not convinced we could use the water that is being described at low latitudes.


Nor me. Interesting - but not a resource.

Cool though.

I want my solar powered MSL sized water farming soil munching robot smile.gif

Posted by: nprev Sep 24 2009, 11:56 PM

QUOTE (djellison @ Sep 24 2009, 01:39 PM) *
I want my solar powered MSL sized water farming soil munching robot smile.gif


...known as "Thirsty" for short... rolleyes.gif

Posted by: Greg Hullender Sep 25 2009, 01:45 AM

Are you sure the water is limited to the top 2 mm or simply that the measurements from space are unable to see below that? I still can't find the original three papers on the AAAS website (even though I'm a member). Perhaps they'll appear tomorrow.

--Greg

Posted by: Paolo Sep 25 2009, 06:17 AM

They are on Sciencexpress http://www.sciencemag.org/sciencexpress/recent.dtl

Posted by: djellison Sep 25 2009, 06:46 AM

QUOTE (Greg Hullender @ Sep 25 2009, 02:45 AM) *
Are you sure the water is limited to the top 2 mm


They did explicitly mention figures like that, several times. If it is basically solar 'rain' so to speak, then I can well imagine it being little more than atomic icing. There, clearly, lots more study to be done.

Posted by: marsbug Sep 25 2009, 12:01 PM


The http://www.universetoday.com/2009/09/24/water-on-the-moon-what-does-it-mean/#more-41392mentions that ejecta from young craters were 'rich' in water and hydroxyl, which might mean that some of it migrates to the subsurface and sticks around. Plus it seems hard to have ultra cold traps at the poles, a continuos (but yes very tenuos) supply of water and hydroxyl, and not have significant amounts of ice to accumulate in the subsurface of said cold traps over geological time (micrometeorite impacts might drive off surface ice faster than it can accumulate). It seems logical that there will be areas with only an atomic icing and areas with relatively large amounts at a certain depth.

The moon does not seem as dead as once thought today, and coupled with the news of very pure ice on mars it's been a good week for finding ice in the inner solar system.

Posted by: glennwsmith Sep 25 2009, 01:34 PM

Say what you will about the quantities involved, words cannot describe the revolutionary potential -- both from a practical and theoretical standpoint -- of the possibility that the solar wind is synthesizing water on the surface of bare rock!!!!!

I mean, this has been one of the wildest fantasies of mankind, starting with Moses. And yes, yes, I know this is not water gushing from a rock -- but still, guys, it IS water from rock!

Stu, doesn't TS Eilot have a line about this?

And I'm with Centsworth II -- think about the cost of hauling it up there. And we haven't even begun to think about ways of exploiting even trace amounts of water. What about big pivoting harvesters such as are used on earth for the reverse process, irrigation? Especially if the water is being constantly created?!?

C'mon guys, get a life!!!! Water from sunshine!!!!!! Has that ever occurred to any of us, even in our wildest dreams?

Posted by: djellison Sep 25 2009, 01:50 PM

Sorry - I just don't seen enough to get excited about. I found the MRO tele-conf that followed far FAR more exciting.

Posted by: Juramike Sep 25 2009, 01:59 PM

Both are very cool. But I think the lunar discovery is a major paradigm shift.

Mars always had water, and the Moon seems to be getting it even now.

Now that the Moon has water molecules, and water molecule transport, that means the moon has a water cycle. Who'd a thunk?

Lunar weather.

Whoa.....

Posted by: Phil Stooke Sep 25 2009, 01:59 PM

"Stu, doesn't TS Eliot have a line about this?"

T. S. Eliot is an anagram of toilets, so he should know all about water.

(paraphrasing Alan Plater here...)

Phil

Posted by: belleraphon1 Sep 25 2009, 03:38 PM

For those of us older than Apollo, this is indeed a major paradigm shift.

Craig smile.gif

Posted by: Greg Hullender Sep 25 2009, 04:43 PM

QUOTE (glennwsmith @ Sep 25 2009, 06:34 AM) *
Stu, doesn't TS Eilot have a line about this?

I'm not Stu, :-) but if you look at "The Wasteland," section V, titled "What the Thunder Said" it has these lines:

QUOTE
Here is no water but only rock
Rock and no water and the sandy road
The road winding above among the mountains
Which are mountains of rock without water
If there were water we should stop and drink
Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think
Sweat is dry and feet are in the sand
If there were only water amongst the rock
Dead mountain mouth of carious teeth that cannot spit
Here one can neither stand nor lie nor sit
There is not even silence in the mountains
But dry sterile thunder without rain


One could have a lot of fun with this -- imagining the dry sterile thunder to be rocket exhaust and so forth.

Here's a link to the whole thing, if anyone's too lazy to google it:

http://www.eliteskills.com/analysis_poetry/The_Waste_Land_by_T_S_Eliot_analysis.php

--Greg

Posted by: Vultur Sep 25 2009, 04:45 PM

Does this data show anything about ice in the permanently-shadowed south pole craters, like the LCROSS target?

Posted by: elakdawalla Sep 25 2009, 04:58 PM

No, almost by definition. All these data are from near-infrared spectrometers that rely upon sunlight to illuminate their targets.

Posted by: Enceladus75 Sep 26 2009, 12:13 AM

This is indeed a pretty astounding discovery that has the potential to change everything. Especially coming after the last few years when there was mounting scepticism of any water being present on the Moon.

Planetary science discoveries in ways seem to be like the water on the Moon story - first seen as impossible, then with further discovery, possible, and then probable if not certain. With even closer scrutiny, scepticism creeps in and the original theories are called into question but then a new breakthrough takes place and the earlier theories are either vindicated or a completely new, unknown of discovery crops up - sometimes in a dramatic way. This is how science works! smile.gif

And despite its operational life cut short, it's a fantastic achievement from Chandryaan 1.

Will LRO be able to confirm the announcement? Does anyone think the imminent impact of LCROSS will reveal water in its impact cloud?

Posted by: belleraphon1 Sep 26 2009, 12:39 AM


What a beautiful result.

Was there not a mention from the first MESSENGER Mercury flyby about H2O in the exopshere? Would seem that on many airless worlds something similar must happen if the solar wind is the hydrogen source.

From dawn to dusk, electric fingers of light weave magic from molecules. The Cosmos is subtle.

Boy do I love this.

Craig




Posted by: Reed Sep 26 2009, 01:00 AM

QUOTE (Enceladus75 @ Sep 25 2009, 05:13 PM) *
Will LRO be able to confirm the announcement?

It was suggested in the press conference that LROs LAMP may shed light (ahem) on the subject. If there's enough water, it seems like LEND may do so as well. Remember that one of the surprises of the early LEND data was finding hydrogen outside of the permanently shadowed craters.

I suspect there is also a rush to re-analyze more existing data. How many other spacecraft have taken calibration data from the moon ? Did Galileo ? Rosetta (which has another earth gravity assist coming up in November) ? It looks like KAGUYAs SP cuts out just short of the spectral feature that M3 detected, but maybe there's something else if you know what you are looking for. What about the Chang'e imaging spectrometer ? I'm sure there's a bunch of people digging through old Apollo papers now too, and thinking about new things to do with those samples.

The hype associating this with water as a resource may be overblown, but definitely cool science.

Posted by: ngunn Sep 26 2009, 09:35 AM

QUOTE (belleraphon1 @ Sep 26 2009, 01:39 AM) *
Would seem that on many airless worlds something similar must happen if the solar wind is the hydrogen source.


That is the subject of a nice article by Jason Perry at Gish Bar Times:
http://gishbar.blogspot.com/2009/09/water-on-dry-worlds.html

Posted by: Juramike Sep 26 2009, 12:57 PM

I wonder if MS analysis could help show where the water comes from?

If water is undergoing a diurnal cycle of desorption-vapor-redeposition then that process should favor the heavier H2(18O). Since the lighter molecule would have a better chance of escaping, so the 18O/16O ratio would be larger.

If water is continually being destroyed by sunlight and reformed from solar hydrogen combining with oxygen species from lunar rock, and assuming lunar rock doesn't have any isotopic oxygen enrichment, then you'd expect a very light isotopic mixture (H2(16O)) with a 18O/16O ratio similar to that found in lunar rock.

Posted by: imipak Sep 26 2009, 01:01 PM

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? http://www.youtube.com/watch?gl=GB&hl=en-GB&v=6uLUhNeT9rI, 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 wink.gif

Posted by: remcook Sep 26 2009, 01:12 PM

A question (can't access the articles right now, so not sure if it's in there): I can understand that these results only say something about the top few millimeter, but where does the statement come from that the OH/water is only there and not also deeper? Does that come from the way it disappears with higher temperature? Although if this is really produced by solar wind I can understand this would be the case, but do we really know?

edit - also, is it significant that the water in the VIMS image and M3 image is mostly confined to the bright regions (e.g. not in a mare) or is it just that the dark regions don't reflect enough light to be able to tell?

Posted by: elakdawalla Sep 26 2009, 02:04 PM

I think people got confused about that -- the depth comes from the infrared spectrometers' ability to see only the top couple mm. THey were talking about that to contrast it with lunar prospector, which can see deeper. Now, you might argue that if LP didn't see H where the spectrometers do see it, that might be evidence that it's only in top couple of mm, but if the abundance was low enough, LP might not see it.

M3 only saw the water near the poles. Happens to be in highlands near the poles. Problem is that M3 only goes out to 3 microns, and has trouble detecting the signature where there's also thermal emission, equatorward of 60 degrees or so. VIMS does have holes over the maria, and this was a question I asked Roger Clark...who has never replied to any email I've ever sent to him. Oh well.

--Emily

Posted by: glennwsmith Sep 26 2009, 03:24 PM


. . . "lunar weather" . . . "toilets" . . . "dry sterile thunder" . . . "water on the moon" . . ."electric fingers of light" . . .



Snatches of conversation from a widely respected space science forum now gone lunatic!

Posted by: Zvezdichko Sep 26 2009, 03:29 PM

... I wonder what the name of this forum is.

Posted by: centsworth_II Sep 26 2009, 04:55 PM

QUOTE (elakdawalla @ Sep 26 2009, 10:04 AM) *
...the depth comes from the infrared spectrometers' ability to see only the top couple mm....

I wonder if the assumption that the water is limited to the top few mm is the result of an assumption that the water is created by the solar wind. That would limit its presence to the surface.

Posted by: Juramike Sep 26 2009, 05:03 PM

QUOTE (glennwsmith @ Sep 26 2009, 10:24 AM) *
...lunatic!


(groan)

You win. laugh.gif

Posted by: glennwsmith Sep 26 2009, 08:23 PM

Juramike, thanks for making the connection! You have made my weekend as well!!!!

Posted by: MarsIsImportant Sep 26 2009, 09:25 PM

The solar wind idea is an interesting one. It might play a role of some kind. I can't help but think the processes involved are probably far more complicated than that. Here is a report from 2008 that suggests evidence for a water source beneath the surface.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19926644.200

I never thought we would see a 'follow the water' strategy for exploration of our moon! Maybe a water cycle on our nearest neighbor...

It does sound a little lunatic. ha ha ha!

Posted by: Fran Ontanaya Sep 26 2009, 09:59 PM

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

Posted by: nprev Sep 26 2009, 11:48 PM

Not to be a wet blanket about the whole lunar water thing, but I still think that this discovery will ultimately prove to be solely of mineralogical/scientific interest rather than a practical future resource.

If there were endogenous water deposits at anything like an accessible depth anywhere on the Moon you'd think that aeons of slow outgassing would have built a pair of substantial polar caps in the permanently shadowed regions, even though most of the H2O would have been photodissociated upon release (most of which probably would have happened in the daytime). These caps would have been 'gardened' by macro/micrometeorite impacts, sure, but there would still be quite a bit of water at or near the surface. Evidence to date indicates that, at best, there is a very sparse amount of ice in the polar regions throroughly mixed with the regolith.

So...I wouldn't be investing in any lunar well-digging companies just yet.

Posted by: Greg Hullender Sep 27 2009, 04:31 AM

QUOTE (nprev @ Sep 26 2009, 04:48 PM) *
So...I wouldn't be investing in any lunar well-digging companies just yet.

Much less whalers. :-)

--Greg

Posted by: Holder of the Two Leashes Sep 27 2009, 07:19 PM

QUOTE (Fran Ontanaya @ Sep 26 2009, 03:59 PM) *
As a curiousity, would water ice survive a lunar day inside the descent stage of the Apollo Lunar Module?

A complicated question. You have fuel tanks, engine parts, batteries and black boxes, various bays, all kinds of nooks and crannies. You'd have to specify a location in the descent stage (preferably saying which descent stage, they are at different latitudes and orientations), and then someone with the proper engineering knowlege (not me) could do a thermal analysis. Since it's mostly metal, you would expect the temperature to even out a lot, and that the noon temperature would probably put the whole thing above freezing. But still, there are going to be hotter and colder areas. And what exactly the ice is attached to will make a difference in conductivity. Also you need to know how much ice. Big chunk, ...little chunk, ...snowflake? What did you have in mind?

My guess, and it really is only a guess, is that standing above the lunar surface in roasting sunlight for several earth days will heat up the whole thing enough to do a lot of damage to interior ice.

Posted by: Phil Stooke Sep 27 2009, 07:37 PM

That sounds about right to me. After the first couple of lunar days there couldn't have been much left.

Phil Stooke

Posted by: Stu Sep 28 2009, 04:51 PM

Lots of interesting blog posts re. the "water on the Moon" story at this week's "Carnival of Space", which I'm proud to be hosting on CUMBRIAN SKY...

http://cumbriansky.wordpress.com/2009/09/28/carnival-of-space-122

One of the best is Emily's 2 parter, which you really should read if you haven't already.

Posted by: Paolo Oct 23 2009, 07:19 PM

The series of "water on the Moon" paper has finally be published in Science today
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/vol326/issue5952/index.dtl

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