NASA's LCROSS Mission Proves Lunar Ice Suspicions 177
NASA is reporting that preliminary data from the LCROSS mission indicates that there really is water in one of the permanently shadowed lunar craters, just as they suspected back in September. "'We are ecstatic,' said Anthony Colaprete, LCROSS project scientist and principal investigator at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif. 'Multiple lines of evidence show water was present in both the high angle vapor plume and the ejecta curtain created by the LCROSS Centaur impact. The concentration and distribution of water and other substances requires further analysis, but it is safe to say Cabeus holds water.'"
Model Predicts Lots More Water (Score:5, Informative)
The dominant paradigm since the Apollo Missions was that the Moon was as dry as a bone.
However, a paper was put out recently (before the discovery of water a month ago) proposing a model for water and other volatiles venting out of the interior of the Moon. One of the predictions of this model is that there should be significant subsurface water primarily near the poles. The results from Chandrayaan-1 and LCROSS today confirms that this is true--there is significant subsurface water near the poles. The claims that the water is solely on the surface and due to cometary deposition or solar wind interactions are now blown "out of the water".
This model predicts a lot more water under the surface for potential use in human exploration. w00t!
Check out the paper here: http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/0909.3832 [lanl.gov]
Re:Whats the hold up (Score:3, Informative)
Even if it does require half a million tons of equipment, that equipment can be made on the Moon rather than launched from Earth at $40k or even $4k per ton. Also it's worth noting that current GDP contribution from natural gas and electricity in the US is somewhere around $200 billion dollars. If you can get the overall fusion power infrastructure including lunar mining to under say, a couple of trillion dollars, then you could switch over the US electricity and heating infrastructure completely to lunar-fueled fusion power. My view is that this mining infrastructure could probably be made and deployed for hundreds of billions of dollars *or less* once manufacture is established on the Moon.
Finally other materials than merely He3 are present. You'd have platinum group metals which would in the presence of significant lunar launch infrastructure be worth exporting to Earth. Rare earths of high enough value might be present in sufficient quantity to extract. Any activity off of Earth would be closer to the Moon in terms of delta v than Earth. So it'd start making sense to launch common materials like glass, iron, oxygen, aluminum, titanium, etc from the Moon rather than from Earth. From this site [moonminer.com], it estimates:
Since about 100 million tons of regolith must be heated to about 1400 deg. F to get one ton of helium 3; 4000 tons of hydrogen; 2800 tons of helium 4; 10,000 tons of nitrogen; 20,000 tons of carbon and 54,000 tons of sulfur will also be obtained.
All of these would be byproducts of such a vast mining operation. Revenue from this operation would be more than just He3.
Re:Whats the hold up (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Whats the hold up (Score:1, Informative)
If a small nuclear reactor has a mass of 100 tonnes, a spaceship has a mass of 50 tonnes, and the fuel required to launch from the Moon to Mars weighs 500 tonnes, it's a hell of a lot cheaper to land a reactor on the Moon, launch the spaceship from Earth, land it (empty) on the Moon, and fuel it there.
If you're doing going to Mars from earth orbit, you've gotta haul 5000 tonnes of fuel out of Earth's gravity well for every flight.
If you're launching from Luna, you pay the 5000-tonne penalty once from Earth orbit to Luna, but the rest of the fuel's effectively free, and you're burning it in 500-tonne increments, not 5000-tonne increments.
Re:Can we just clarify something? (Score:2, Informative)
actually.... plants can do just fine in lunar soil
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7351437.stm
Re:Whats the hold up (Score:3, Informative)
BUT, hey, it is silly waste of resource to the idiots that think that they will solve all of the World's need by focusing HERE. Right?
Re:Can we just clarify something? (Score:3, Informative)
Oxygen is cheap on the moon if you can get a good energy source (ie. nuclear reactor). The moon is mostly silicon / iron / calcium oxide.
Re:Drill baby drill! (Score:3, Informative)
And they couldn't see the vast majority of the plume.
Re:Whats the hold up (Score:3, Informative)
Your point about the composition of the moon makes sense, but your citing mines going deep doesn't.
The deepest mine is about 4km, and compared to the Earth's diameter of 12.7k km, that's not very deep. To scrape enough mass off the surface of the Earth to make the moon, you'd probably be going deeper than most mines.
However, I suspect that while there are rich veins of metal in the surface of the Earth, most of the metal is below the surface, in the mantle and the core. But none of our mines go anywhere near that deep.
Re:Because I Said So, That's Why! (Score:3, Informative)
Or are you a creationist troll ?
I'm a deeply confirmed atheist, so much so that I can't imagine trolls at all, other than as pejorative labels for creationists. This linked article [nasa.gov] was the first handy bit I could find that speaks directly to my post. /. has run a few stories about the problems with the earth's amount of water and it's origins. If you want a more lore based recounting, Captain Jean Luc Picard narrated a pbs special, titled, IIRC, "Moon's Origins". Picard's aka Patrick Stewart's pronunciation of a French name in a truculent, anglo-saxon accent is worth the time to hunt up a copy at your local library.