Unambiguous Evidence of Water On the Moon 251
Nethemas the Great writes "Information has leaked ahead of the scheduled NASA press conference tomorrow that we have found unambiguous evidence for water on the moon. From the article, 'Since man first touched the moon and brought pieces of it back to Earth, scientists have thought that the lunar surface was bone dry. But new observations from three different spacecraft have put this notion to rest with what has been called "unambiguous evidence" of water across the surface of the moon.'"
great news (Score:5, Funny)
I'll be thirsty after the long ride.
Re:great news (Score:4, Funny)
Yes Indeed, But Rocket Propulsion Sucks (Score:2, Funny)
Great news indeed. Still, it's depressing to think that we're still using an ancient, dangerous, primitive and very expensive space transportation technology: rocket propulsion. One thing is sure; we'll never colonize the solar system with rockets at the rate we're going.
But rejoice. Soon, a new form of transportation will arrive, one based on the realization that we are immersed in an immense ocean of energetic particles. This is a consequence of a reevaluation of our understanding of the causality of moti
Re:Yes Indeed, But Rocket Propulsion Sucks (Score:5, Funny)
And then we can have magic flying hamburgers that zoom into your mouth when you give them the secret whistle!
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He's modded funny, but he's right (well, maybe not he part about "immersed in an immense ocean of energetic particles" even though we are indeed immersed in an immense ocean of energetic particles; that is, after all, what matter and energy are).
We live in primitive times. The 1800s are considered by us to be primitive, but to a man getting off of a train and sending a telegraph to someone hundreds of miles away, it was amazingly high tech, almost magic. To someone watching Star Trek in the 1960s, their cel
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So to clarify, aside from all the things he got wrong, such as "based on the realization that we are immersed in an immense ocean of energetic particles", and "Soon", he's right?
This guy sounds amazing! He gets everything right (except the things he gets wrong).
Re:Yes Indeed, But Rocket Propulsion Sucks (Score:4, Insightful)
And I guarantee you that their teenagers will probably all still rebel, they'll still groggily and grumpily get up for work in the morning, and they'll still grow old wishing that they hadn't fritted their youth away.
We're more or less still living like we lived 5,000 years ago, from a macro perspective. Somehow I don't see that changing any time soon (unless, of course, we all die).
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Not to sound too blase' about progress, but you still wake up at 6 in the morning and poop. You just don't have to go outside to do it now. You still have to wash your clothes, you just don't really have to iron them. Replacing Kerosine in the lamps has been switched to replacing the bulbs in the lights that hang in exactly the same spot.
Our both daily and macro lifecycle is still far more recognizably human than anything else. Again, I don't want to be too dismissive of the major improvements in medica
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he's right (well, maybe not [the] part about "immersed in an immense ocean of energetic particles" even though we are indeed immersed in an immense ocean of energetic particles;
Do you not understand what that word means?
right (adj) - correct in judgment, opinion, or action.
Re:Yes Indeed, But Rocket Propulsion Sucks (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Yes Indeed, But Rocket Propulsion Sucks (Score:4, Informative)
no.
Rocket propulsion blows.
Jet propulsion is the one that sucks, of course it also blows.
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My brain hurts.
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Yes, it would be nice, wouldn't it? But Rome was not built in one day. Have patience. Inertia can be ignored, even under extremely powerful acceleration, if every atom in the ship and its occupants are accelerated simultaneously and equally.
Re:Yes Indeed, But Rocket Propulsion Sucks (Score:4, Funny)
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Sure, but I would think it's quite a task to move even a 2D array of atoms "simultaneously and equally", let alone an entire 3D object..
Re:Yes Indeed, But Rocket Propulsion Sucks (Score:5, Informative)
Jump off a building. Seriously. Your atoms are not accelerated quite simultaneously and equally due to the slight incline of the gravitational plane, but the difference is almost negligible (ignoring air resistance), and so you don't feel any acceleration (fall into a small black hole and the differences become important and you become spaghetti). You won't be injured until you hit the ground and the atoms in your feet are the only ones being accelerated, with the others being brought to stationary by the electromagnetic force propagating through your body. The same effect can be achieved in mass drivers with ferromagnetic projectiles in a vacuum.
The grandparent is an idiot who has read too much science fiction, but his ideas are theoretically sound. The practical problems are huge, however, not 'just around the corner'.
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Yep I was thinking a gravitational field might get close to what he wants if it's from a relatively large object acting perpendicular to a relatively small, flat and thin surface, but it still wouldn't be perfect. For *very* strong gravitational fields pulling on objects with irregular densities, surely there is still the potential to get seriously mess yourself up :P And does a change in an object's mass have an immediate effect on the rest of the universe, or does the influence propagate at the speed of l
Let's Have It, Then (Score:2)
Well, then how about you explain why/how objects in motion tend to stay in motion or at rest. If it's that easy.
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That is indeed the answer, though there is some evidence from symmetry and conservation - which is somewhat circular.
But your answer is totally different from the answer to which I replied. While the linked "physics rebel" blog does not have a more convincing answer among its diatribe and handwaving, that rebel is correct to point out that practically all physics is based on an axiom like inertia/momentum. Which is a matter of faith, as much as "god moves it" was. The answer to which I replied is quite wron
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Springs.
See? That's even simpler, so it must be true.
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Springs are more complex than strings.
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I'll be thirsty after the long ride.
Really?
What they don't tell you is that the only reason there is water on the Moon is because Neil Armstrong needed a pee.
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I'll be thirsty after the long ride.
Really?
What they don't tell you is that the only reason there is water on the Moon is because Neil Armstrong needed a pee.
So that's where the Sea of Tranquility came from.
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Isn't it funny how science changes based on advances in the available data, observations and other evidences?
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Not enough (Score:5, Insightful)
The water these missions have found is present in very small quantities. Extracting it would require a lot of energy. The hope with polar water is that there might be masses of the stuff in some craters so that you could at least get a kilo of water from 20 or so kilos of regolith. Water in those quantities would be of use to humans. But we haven't seen it yet.
Re:Not enough (Score:5, Interesting)
The water these missions have found is present in very small quantities. Extracting it would require a lot of energy.
Unlimited energy is available on the moon.
You can run a stirling engine indefinitely based on the temperature differential between sunlight/radioisotopes and shade.
Alternatively, you could go solar.
Weight is your only real limit.
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Unlimited energy is available on the moon.
They said that about earth. And look what happened with that.
Re:Not enough (Score:5, Insightful)
Erm, we haven't actually run out yet. You see there's this big glowy thing in the middle of our solar system bombarding the Earth with fresh energy every day.
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Re:Not enough (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, but good luck running your solar powered lunar water extraction system on a cloudy day.
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Yeah those moon showers are something fierce. Plus they mess everything up since they are made of milk to add to the cheese layers of the moon.
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LordKronos -> Joke -/-> You
Get it?
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The water these missions have found is present in very small quantities. Extracting it would require a lot of energy.
Unlimited energy is available on the moon.
If your time is unlimited, yes. In practice there will be an economic trade off between mining water and importing it from asteroids.
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There would be concentrated areas
But we don't know. Experience on Earth, where water accumulates, doesn't apply.
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It's such a shame that responses like yours are likely to be the result of this announcement. "We found evidence that water is widespread on the Moon" in no way invalidates "We found evidence that there is *abundant* water in the permanently shadowed craters at the poles of the Moon".. in fact, it's exactly the opposite. That's where water will be mined on the Moon.
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Maybe we should accept that the moon is not like the Earth and get on with a manned mission to an asteroid.
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Curse those dreamers, they never get anything done. They should be happy with their antelope on a stick.
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Re:Not enough (Score:5, Funny)
Arthur C. Clarke's zombie is shambling over to your house chanting "Europa".
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We were told to attempt no landings there.
Ob: (Score:2)
The water these missions have found is present in very small quantities. Extracting it would require a lot of energy.
This is the bond of water. We know the rites.
A man's flesh is his own; the water belongs to the tribe.
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Unless he dies in a duel, in which case the water belongs to the victor.
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No surprise (Score:5, Funny)
Re:No surprise (Score:5, Funny)
Be quiet or I'l send Buzz around.
Re:No surprise (Score:4, Funny)
Moon landing fake exposed ! [stuffucanuse.com]
Our US readers might want to familiarise themselves with those alien creatures [wikipedia.org] before replying.
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Coming soon: (Score:5, Funny)
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Who carry their harpoons!
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Heavily rumoured (Score:3, Interesting)
The Future..... (Score:3, Funny)
Snake Oil/Dietery Supplement salesmen from the future:
"Lunar Water! Boosts your immune system! Eliminates Earthly toxins! Alleviates impotence, back pain, arthritis, digestive irregularity! Strengthens bones, teeth, and joints! BUT IT NOW! *ONLY* $250,000,000! Operators are standing by!
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"Lunar Water! Boosts your immune system! Eliminates Earthly toxins! Alleviates impotence, back pain, arthritis, digestive irregularity! Strengthens bones, teeth, and joints! BUT IT NOW! *ONLY* $250,000,000! Operators are standing by!
Who let Tom Cruise in here again?
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Yeah, my grandpa says he bought his classic 1993 pickup truck for $12,500, and that a gallon of diesel was $1.99 a gallon back then. That old vintage rig still has the original radio..... He says it's an AM/FM Cassette deck or something. I hate the music though. Every time I go over to his house, he's listening to some really old dude called Van Halen or something. He even has something called a "286" that he uses to play this boring game called Tetris.....
Mis-Interpretation of the Data? (Score:2, Informative)
... "While the probe was still active, its NASA-built Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3) detected wavelengths of light reflected off the surface that indicated the chemical bond between hydrogen and oxygen" ... ... "At noon, when the sun's rays were strongest, the water feature was lowest, while in the morning, the feature was stronger." ...
From this they seem to draw the conclusion that the water is moving.
If they are measuring reflection, that includes such of sunlight and all other incoming light. Including tha
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They could reject that by looking for correlation with the position of the sun in the sky relative to the Earth and moon, ie, are we looking at night or day side?
It was the Indians who helped NASA find water (Score:5, Informative)
"India's first lunar mission has found evidence of large quantities of water on its surface, The Times newspaper reported on Thursday."
from http://www.hindustantimes.com/Is-there-water-on-moon-NASA-to-reveal/H1-Article1-457426.aspx
Re:It was the Indians who helped NASA find water (Score:5, Informative)
Mod parent up please
Original article is here:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/science/space/article6846639.ece
Re:It was the Indians who helped NASA find water (Score:5, Informative)
Re:It was the Indians who helped NASA find water (Score:5, Insightful)
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My first thought was "Big Indians or Little Indians"? Weird how your brain gets wired after a few years of hackin'.
I think it's a sign from the Tiki Gods that it's time for coffee...
Ice thinning (Score:4, Funny)
I guess that explains where all our arctic and antarctic ice caps have disappeared to then.
Unambiguous? (Score:2)
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Re:Unambiguous? (Score:5, Informative)
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The scan works by looking for the OH bond, as I recall, which resonates on a particular frequency. I may be talking nonsense now, because it's a few years since I looked at this tech, but it basically works on the same principle as your microwave oven. That emits microwaves that cause the OH bonds to resonate, exciting the molecules and generating heat. This works by causing the OH bonds to resonate (in exactly the same way) and then picking up the IR that they emit as they return to their non-excited state. All that it can conclusively say is that there are molecules containing OH bonds present, but the simplest molecule containing this bond is water and so it's very probable that they've found water. Even if they haven't, they've found something that can be turned into water relatively easily, given sufficient power (e.g. a lunar solar array).
You're pretty much right on. Every molecular bond has several resonant energies for different types of vibrational modes, and a primary way of finding what you have in a sample is irradiating it and measuring at which frequencies it's absorbing energy. The MMM is specifically designed to detect in the range where hydroxy absorption would be detected [nasa.gov], unlike previous moon mappers. (Why? I wonder. It seems like that'd be a basic thing they'd want to detect, and my memory of IR spectrometers and spectrop
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It would be very difficult for nature or a chemist to generate hydroxyl compounds and not generate some water at the same time.
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Alcohols have a hydroxyl group, so it could also be ethyl alcohol (C3C2OH).
Ethyl alcohol? you mean the kind of alcohol found in Alcoholic beverages? Now we are talking!! This will surely spark a new race to the moon!
ChandraYaan .... (Score:2, Insightful)
Surface Only? (Score:2)
It strikes me that since the Moon is similar in composition to the Earth, having been essentially "blown off" as a large chunk in its early development, that there would be a vast amount of water beneath the surface. Obviously not in liquid form, but far in excess of what you would find on the surface.
Bottled Moon Water... (Score:2)
BTW I patent Bottled Moon Water!!!
Forgot to flush (Score:2)
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Nah, it was just remnants from the most recent space shuttle toilet flush. [slashdot.org]
manned exploration (Score:2)
That's why we need manned space exploration: if we only had sent people instead of probes, they would have found this long ago!
Oh, wait...
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People with a base and some equipment (microscopes, spectroscopes, chemistry gear) would be extremely useful. Building a base wouldn't even be that hard. Just lay the foundation, put an inflatable dome over it, and grow some plants to keep the O2->CO2 cycle going. It could be quite roomy, and solar power (to reclaim drinking water and run the gear) would be no problem with no atmosphere.
The Myopia That is NASA (Score:2)
Re:Humanity to the Moon (Score:5, Funny)
I hope that the Indians are able to establish a lunar colony; they certainly have the expertise.
The casinos might take off, that's a business that will attract customers no matter where you build one. If they've gone and bought Rotary Rocket's [wikipedia.org] intellectual property, the ATV is certainly the right shape too. But there are precious few bison up there...
Re:Humanity to the Moon (Score:5, Funny)
And here I was looking forward to eating a nice curry on the moon. I had the wrong Indians all along.
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Actually, Native Americans have been lying to Americans all along. When anyone else visits, they're treated to really amazing curry, which puts Southern Asia's to shame.
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Casinos? Indiginous Americans ("Injuns") own casinos. The Indians own all the convienience stores.
Re:BREAKING NEWS! (Score:5, Insightful)
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Whether it is common enough to assume presence is not clear at all. What's clear is that we didn't assume it.
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Re:BREAKING NEWS! (Score:4, Informative)
...and ultraviolet light from the sun which breaks the water molecule down into oxygen and hydrogen. Water is unstable on the surface where it gets exposed to light but it should be stable in shadow on the surface and under ground. The problem is that almost no places on the surface have remained shadowed for hundreds of millions of years (except possibly the polar craters) and shallow subsurface still get rotated to the surface by meteor impacts, while deep places are... deep and hard to reach.
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Water as a liquid isn't stable in vacuum and it evaporates, but UV doesn't decompose it. Comets are water.
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Water as a liquid isn't stable in vacuum and it evaporates, but UV doesn't decompose it. Comets are water.
Comets are also out in a very dark, very cold place. When they come close to the Sun, water boils off from them, then gets ionized by solar radiation (UV and other bands). That means it decomposes into ions.
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I think you mean, by average density. By volume, most things are abundant. But then again, with no universe-independent reference data, we can't really measure in such terms.
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I'm sure every nation on the planet would love to have one country (any country) put a nuclear power station on the moon... especially while most of them are claiming "renewable" energy as the new, big, thing while letting reactors that produce 100's of time more energy at the same environmental cost fall into disrepair.
And the next problem would be... how the hell do you get that kind of infrastructure up there? That's probably gonna weigh more than the total amount of payload the planet's ever put into s
Re:Tritium Mines (Score:4, Interesting)
There's plenty of solar power on the Moon's surface, and plenty of materials for construction in its crust. The first stage would be launching a small amount of automated fabrication machinery, run by a small crew, to build a solar power plant.
That plant could supply the energy to power the larger construction of a nuclear plant. Again, using local materials, and a larger crew supported by the larger infrastructure built by the solar power. The nuclear power available would be much larger than even the solar power.
Along the way, the power, infrastructure and crew would be capable of doing a lot more than building the next phase. Lunar science, other industrial engineering, telescopy, and launching other missions to farther out.
A solar base should take America no more than 5-8 years to build, if funded intelligently (ie, at the levels at which we love to fund wars for oil, but with a larger and more guaranteed return on investment). A nuclear base should take no more than 10 years to build, with probably 2-3 of those years performed during the 5-8 years building the solar plant. So the nuke plant could be operating somewhere 12-16 years or so from commencement. Since the US is right now deciding the entire roadmap for offplanet development, the clock should start in a year or two. Twenty years until we have sufficient power to explore, industrialize and colonize the nearby solar neighborhood is quite short, especially with lots of material benefits to show sooner along the way.
As for other countries, that's their problem. Many nuclear capable countries already launch nuke plants in satellites. That's a much more dangerous operation than building one on the Far Side of the Moon. And as usual, the US project will create the science and engineering, as well as working proof of concept, for other countries to do it themselves. We always give away some of the most valuable products of our investments in space, because it makes the world better in which Americans can live (as well as others who take advantage of it).
The US is going to put more and more nukes in space, even if it's just the CIA and Pentagon getting the monopoly. The more we do it for more peaceful and constructive purposes, the safer we'll be in every way. We could spend the next couple decades doing it. Or arguing why we shouldn't - and watching China, India, Russia, Japan and other global competitors doing it instead - and probably not as well. We can be Spain in this new age of exploration/colonization/industrialization, or we can be Britain. I'd like my grandchildren to keep speaking English.
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Rocket's will never get us very far out of the Earth's gravity well. Nuclear is the only way we are going to explore outside of Earth's gravity well efficiently. Unfortunately, Greenpeace has everyone worried that nuclear is the enemy.
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Bacteria mutate fairly easily.
Prions are still large unknowns.
And it is possible for life to be something different than what we are looking for.
Any mission that goes there should be one-way for a LONG time.