NASA Strikes Gold and Water On the Moon 421
tcd004 writes "The PBS NewsHour reports: there is water on the moon — along with a long list of other compounds, including mercury, gold and silver. That's according to a more detailed analysis of the cold lunar soil near the moon's South Pole. The results were released as six papers by a large team of scientists in the journal, Science Thursday. [Note: Nature's papers are behind a paywall; for a few more details, reader coondoggie points out a a story at Network World.] The data comes from the October 2009 mission, when NASA slammed a booster rocket traveling nearly 6,000 miles per hour into the moon and blasted out a hole. Trailing close behind it was a second spacecraft, rigged with a spectrometer to study the lunar plume released by the blast. The mission is called LCROSS, for Lunar Crater Observer and Sensing Satellite."
Re:cheaper mining? (Score:5, Informative)
Will we eventually mine the moon? Yes. Will it happen in the next 5 decades? Probably not and even then, the materials mined would make more sense to be used on something like a lunar colony, not for export back to Earth.
Re:Gold? (Score:5, Informative)
I have to wonder how much of that gold was debris from the spacecraft - plating for connections, etc. Once the thing hit, I would imagine (and I am just guessing) that the plume that resulted was pretty well mixed with well-blended spacecraft.
Oh well, with the article behind a paywall, I'm not about to find out. Nice to pay for the science - NASA - out of the taxpayers pocket, then charge us again for the results, eh?
Thanks to google, I can find it all by myself.
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/LCROSS/main/oct_21_media_telecon.html [nasa.gov]
-Taylor
Re:Gold? (Score:5, Informative)
The word "gold" does not appear on that page. Nor did I see anything about accounting for the metals in the spacecraft in the general sense. So I'm still in the dark. Unless there's something indirect there you expected me to follow?
Jesus christ you're lazy!
I don't know, poke around. They even list a number to call to get a rebroadcast version of the press conference:
"Media Telecon: LCROSS and LRO Science Science Results of Lunar Impact10.21.10
Date: Thursday, Oct. 21, 2010
Time: 11 a.m. PDT / 2 p.m. EDT
A replay of the teleconference will be available until Nov. 4, 2010 by dialing 888-566-0674 from within the United States, or 203-369-3084 internationally. Passcode is 6267."
You complained about not being able to access the information that we have a legal right to access freely (everything NASA does is public domain, or something like that).
I guess i figured my point went without saying, but i must have been wrong. My point was: If you look around, the information *is* available. It just might not be in the format you want. Some reporter for a newspaper sat around and listened to that press conference though, and made the data easier to get to. That paywall pays for that man's time. If you don't want to pay, NASA provides the number to call and listen yourself. Or, the other point I was trying to make, is that you could just google around. A quick search for "nasa lcross gold" brought up:
http://www.universetoday.com/76329/water-on-the-moon-and-much-much-more-latest-lcross-results/ [universetoday.com]
I'm sure NASA will put the data online at some point, but people have to write reports and all that. Until then, your options are pretty clear, and I don't see any cause to complain, except to be annoying.
-Taylor
Re:Wouldn't mining the moon be a bad idea? (Score:5, Informative)
OK. so the mass of the moon is, oh about 7.346 x 10^22kg [wolframalpha.com] that's approximately 73459000000000000000 tonnes. If we extract, say, 1 million tonnes of stuff from the moon, that's about 1.3 x 10^-17 %, also known as a poofteenth of a percent.
According to my calculations, this will be enough to move the moon closer to us by about 4.76 x 10^-11 metres or approximately the diameter of a hydrogen atom.
Re:Wouldn't mining the moon be a bad idea? (Score:3, Informative)
Some of the damage we've done is visible from the moon. Take the Aral sea: down from almost 70000 square kilometres to under 20000.
Re:cheaper mining? (Score:2, Informative)
Gold is pretty much worthless outside earth. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:elements (Score:3, Informative)
When talking about Conduction though it is good to specify electrical conduction or heat conduction. They are definitely correlated, but not equivlent.
The best known heat conductor is diamond, but diamond is a terrible conductor of electricity.
It is also good to specify the arrangement in question. Consider that the best heat conductor is diamond, but graphene is not a very good heat conductor.
The most common solid phases of silver are among the best electrical conductors known, although that status does depend on the temperature in question, since for example, at superconducting temperatures, superconductors easily beat out silver.
As for uses of Gold. Gold's most notable attributes are relatively high heat and electrical conductivity, its appearance, the ability to easily create thin wires or thin sheets of it, and its highly inert nature (including not oxidizing).
Just about all practical applications (as opposed to vanity applications) of gold could use some other metal, however, due to those properties gold is often seen as the better choice. For example, even microelectronics could use other metals in place of gold, but in such applications gold is often used as very fine wires, so even slight oxidation could be problematic, and further most other metals are far more difficult to shape into such fine wires.
Re:Gold? (Score:4, Informative)
And when someone else determines that the "positive results" are hogwash, they are shown to be a bunch of fools and lose their valuable reputation.
Funny how this whole "peer review" thing works.
Re:AND CHEESE! LOTS AND LOTS OF CHEESE! (Score:1, Informative)
No wai! Cold ribs are blech, and rewarmed arn't much better
As for the Budweiser, there's no way you could get that stuff cold enough to taste good.
Re:Gold is pretty much worthless outside earth. (Score:3, Informative)
Gold is very useful for plating electrical connections. It's nearly as conductive as silver but doesn't oxidise like silver does.