NASA Briefs Preliminary Plume Findings from Moon Mission Options

[briv1016]

http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2009/nov/H...S_briefing.html

[tanjent]

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.

[Holder of the Tw...]

As I recall from the blog site (someone correct me on this if I'm wrong), every bit of the hydrazine was successfully vented, or used.

Any attempt to set up shop and utilize trace amounts of lunar water will have to invest heavily just in thermal insulation alone... But to significantly lower the costs of exploration we need at least a recognizable "dirty snowfield," not the Atacama desert.

I'm afraid I must disagree. In a vacuum, you don't have to invest heavily in thermal shielding. Proper reflection and disposal of waste heat (here, it would be upward toward the sky) and careful use of insulating materials in the proper location (thermally isolate the wheels on a rover, keep them cold) would enable the enviroment to be maintained as long as the rover didn't stay in one spot very long. Witness the Spitzer telescope, which maintains its innards during the current warm mission at 30 degree K, even in constant direct sunlight.

Earlier, use of the 100 ppm implanted regolith hydrogen was considered as a cost effective resource (by Harrison Schmidt, among others), even though it would require much higher roasting temperatures to obtain. Water ice will require less energy to get out.

As far as infrastructure, a landed vehicle could be refueled over time using its own propellant tanks for storage. You just need the rover dropping off its load multiple times.