NASA Estimates 600 Million Metric Tons of Water Ice At Moon's North Pole 271
After analyzing data from a radar device aboard last year's Indian Chandrayaan-1 mission to the Moon, NASA scientists have found what they estimate to be 600 million metric tons of water ice in craters around the Moon's north pole.
"Numerous craters near the poles of the Moon have interiors that are in permanent sun shadow. These areas are very cold and water ice is stable there essentially indefinitely. Fresh craters show high degrees of surface roughness (high circular polarization ratio) both inside and outside the crater rim, caused by sharp rocks and block fields that are distributed over the entire crater area. However, Mini-SAR has found craters near the north pole that have high CPR inside, but not outside their rims. This relation suggests that the high CPR is not caused by roughness, but by some material that is restricted within the interiors of these craters. We interpret this relation as consistent with water ice present in these craters. The ice must be relatively pure and at least a couple of meters thick to give this signature."
Send up some miners (Score:5, Interesting)
Having been a Heinlein fan for the last 30 or so years, I have to say this makes me happy inside.
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It shouldn't. Monoliths give the same readings.
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Re:Send up some miners (Score:4, Insightful)
Water is one of the key things you'd need to run a settlement for other purposes -- a great deal of it is required to maintain an ecosystem (remember, you want plants for both food and air), it's extremely expensive to lift out of the gravity well, and it can be trivially broken down into hydrogen and oxygen, both of which are useful on their own. No, ice is worth far more up there than down here; why would you ship it down (at least, without first producing a useful product out of it, thus increasing its value)?
Slandering Heinlein... *shakes head*.
What other purposes? (Score:4, Insightful)
What other purposes? I've never seen any convincing rationale for wanting to settle the moon. But let's dispose of some rejoinders right up front, shall we?
Look, I read all the Heinlein books too. They were great. And colonizing space would be really cool. But there has to be some kind of economically feasible way to do it, and there just isn't.
Re:Send up some miners (Score:5, Insightful)
Bottled moon water. :)
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The moon is, more or less, as inhospitable as Mars. The point of settling on the moon would be to learn how to settle other planets, except that the stakes and upfront cost are far smaller.
Re:Send up some miners (Score:5, Funny)
The moon is a way station. I mean, almost NO ONE meant to settle in places like Kansas City, all those years ago. But, some of the early passers-by saw that it could be profitable to build a few stores, to cater to the OTHER settlers going west.
Besides - slashdot has plenty of creatures who dwell in basements. They'd be perfectly content to dig into the moon's surface with all that ice water at hand. Plant a few plants, rig up a little solar power, add a few fiber optic cables, and you'd have one hell of a LAN party.
Hey - I've gotta go patent this idea I just had, see you 'round!
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Where would the solar power be coming from, given that the only water that's there is buried in permanent shadow?
You'd need a heck of a tower, or a pump. Or a huge orbital mirror array to shine light where the sun don't normally shine. But then the ice would melt and there'd be no point to settling those craters again. drats!
Someone will patent these ideas anyway, and maybe be foolish enough to implement. Same ones with all of these carbon sequestration schemes... they've got it all wrong! If they REA
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Plant a few plants...
Now you're talking about some serious export potential [tv.com].
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Well, that and that's where their wagon wheels broke. That's why they have them sticking out of the ground at the end of their driveway, and holding up the lamps in the middle of the saloon.
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Obviously, you didn't grow up reading Heinlein and people like him. It's doable. No, of course it isn't doable for people with no imagination, and an unwillingness to change. You can't take your lawn with you, your old oak tree for shade, and grandpa's shed with all the neat crap he saved from the days of Model T's.
The people who go out there will adapt, or they will die. Plain and simple. On the moon, they'll dig into the crust to get away from the radiation, and they will make homes from concrete and
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Why would you settle there in the first place, when it's a barren rock?
I dunno, ask the guys who built it [wikipedia.org].
Re:Send up some miners (Score:4, Interesting)
Why would you settle there in the first place, when it's a barren rock? Sure ice makes the moon SLIGHTLY more survivable, but to what end?
Why doesn't everyone live on a comfortable tropical beach? Because that's not where the opportunities are. If you want a better job or doing something new and challenging, you don't go to the beach, even if it has the best possible climate for day-to-day living.
It's pretty obvious that there's almost nothing of value to us currently on the Moon (there are a few corner mirrors left over from the 60's that still work, I think that's it). But there's good reason to expect that to change over the decades. Commercial activity has been steadily increasing over the past 45 years. Launch costs have slowly declined over that time as well. We see serious new attempts to enter the launch market (the new Russian commercial efforts, one for every launch vehicle they have, two new companies in the US in the past 25 years, Orbital Sciences Corp and SpaceX, China coming out with the Chang Zheng (Long March) 5, India developing more capable launch vehicles).
I think we'll continue to grow a presence in space until we get to the point where off-planet support infrastructure makes sense. Physically, the Moon is a much easier place to get materials from. It has a much lower gravity well (for example, lunar escape velocity is almost a fifth that of Earth's), copious solar power, no atmosphere (helps all launch system designs except air breathing vehicles) plentiful oxygen locked in the rock, and good concentrations of the light metals that are currently desired for spacecraft (aluminum, lithium, magnesium, titanium, etc). It also has the sort of volcanic/asteroid activity that lead in the past to enormous platinum group metal deposits on Earth (that is, there appears to be nothing unique to Earth about the way the deposits formed).
These resources currently have no value to us, because we don't have the stuff in place to take advantage of them. But my view is that this won't always be the case. We can't say that it won't be worth mining gold on the Moon 50 or 100 years from now, merely because the current costs exceed possible gain by a few orders of magnitude. These things change over time and as I've noted, they have been getting better for a while now.
Re:Send up some miners (Score:5, Insightful)
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Well yeah. If the moon was soft -- like if it was made of cheese for example -- then that would have made landing and subsequent takeoff more difficult.
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I dunno, people import bottled water from some pretty darned remote places.
I, for one, would take a sip. 8-D
But then again, I also drink from most public water fountains.
fatal flaw: (Score:2)
And assuming you get over that hurdle, wouldn't you have to ship up more kg of prisoners than you ship down kg of wheat? Or could you get close to a 1:1 ratio if you freeze-dried the wheat to recover moisture before shipment?
Re:fatal flaw: (Score:4, Interesting)
Why would you need to extract water from the prisoners? You're getting labor out of them, so they have far more value alive. When they die, certainly, there's much to reuse -- but "returning to the soil" (as water and fertilizer) has a great deal of precedence, so I hardly see why it would be objectionable.
As for it being an open system, quite true -- the discovery that the readily available water would run out and they'd find themselves starving in less than a decade was a key factor in Heinlein's prisoners' revolt.
Pardon? Set up a self-sustaining economy (water and energy being the two ongoing inputs -- the former being a limited natural resource on the moon and the latter being easy to generate) and the prisoners can feed themselves using the food they grow and water they mine, raise families, build more tunnels as-needed for additional living space, and otherwise provide for themselves. There's a bit of handwaving here regarding availability of other plant nutrients -- would need to do research on composition of moon rocks and cost to import any materials which aren't locally available -- but inasmuch as we're limiting our discussion to water, I don't see the feasibility concerns.
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Screw the miners, send up some Whalers!
Earth (Score:2, Insightful)
Sounds like a lot until you realize there the amount on earth is measured as a few 10^18 metric tons. More than a couple orders of magnitude difference.
Re:Earth (Score:5, Insightful)
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"Where did you get that ring???" sob - slap slap
To that you're supposed to answer "I went to Jared", or at least that's what the TV says will make her and her closest friends happy.
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Wow talk about clueless mods...
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Units! (Score:4, Funny)
It's ice, you clod! (Score:5, Informative)
Solids need to be measured in Volkswagen beetles.
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Well, a 1967 VW Beetle weighs 840kg [wikipedia.org], or 0.84 tons. 6*10^8*0.84 = 714,285,714.3 VW Beetles.
ITYM 714 megabeetles.
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But I'm American.
Is there any way you can compare it to football?
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1000L = 1 Metric Ton(http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_many_liters_of_water_is_in_one_ton_of_water)
2,500,000L = 1 Olympic Swiming Pool(http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_much_water_does_an_Olympic_sized_swimming_pool_hold)
My math might be off, but that puts 600,000,000 Metric Tons of water at 240,000 Olympic swimming pools worth =D
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... but that puts 600,000,000 Metric Tons of water at 240,000 Olympic swimming pools worth =D
OK, so that's by far and away NOT an inexhaustible supply then!
Using it for basic 'living' needs ought to be all fine and dandy (ie O2, drinkies, plants, washing, sports) assuming we can sensibly recycle the stuff, and AFAIK we're already OK at that (see ISS). Indeed, that much water should support a pretty sizeable colony.
Using it as 'propellant' might not be so sensible though, as it will dwindle PDQ!
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1 metron ton = 1000 kilograms
Liters which translates, for water, to roughly the same to kg.
According to Wiki, an olympic pool as a minimum volume of 2,500 m3 (88,000 cu ft) or 2,500,000 L (550,000 imp gal; 660,000 US gal) which would be filled with 2500 tons of water.
hence, you could fill up 2400 olympic pools (6 000 000 / 2500 ).
If you take into account the atmospheric pressure, weight of ice and perfect ratio between the water - kilos conversion that number might variate a bit.
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How did you and AC get your answers so different? I'm guessing AC had his last equation screwed up...
Still, this would be enough water for a pretty sizable settlement on the moon, so I think we should be all set for settling the moon.
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Why did you guess who was wrong when the numbers were right there?
It's Intelligent Mathematics. When in doubt, go with faith.
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"A pint's a pound the world around."
You can't make neat rhymes with metrics.
"A litre's a kilogram the world o' sham a lam."
It just doesn't work.
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I prefer imperial units. I know metric units are more simple and logical, but...
"A pint's a pound the world around."
- That isn't an Imperial unit. That's a US customary unit.
- An Imperial pint (the one used when you buy beer in a pub in Britain, 568mL) of water weights a pound and a quarter. My grandma would tell you, "a pint of water weighs a pound and a quarter."
I'm sure you could make something up:
A litre of water weighs a kilo, or ought'a.
Are there any other rhymes? I don't know of any.
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That's a lot of Harvey Wallbangers!
Just trying to put it in units that would have been appropriate for the last time anyone was on the moon. I am somewhat surprised there wasn't a smoking apparatus of some kind for the inside of spacesuits!
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Water ice?!?!
That's like saying, "hey, come on over to my place and we'll go swimming in my water pool!"
Ice [wikipedia.org] is a solid phase, usually crystalline, of a non-metallic substance that is liquid or gas at room temperature, such as water, carbon dioxide ice (dry ice), ammonia ice, or methane ice.[1] However, the predominant use of the term ice is for water ice, technically restricted to one of the 15 known crystalline phases of water.
Note that "predominant" does not mean "only". It's quite possible to have, say, methane ice.
That should roughly equal (Score:5, Informative)
1,267,327,975,003 pints of beer.
Habitable Moon (Score:5, Interesting)
This is great. Now all we need is oxygen and we can live there. Hmmm..... O2 from electrolysis of water, powered by solar?
Sounds like it might now be vastly easier to establish a self-sustaining moon colony.
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Tell me again why I'd want to colonize the bottom of a gravity well when sunshine is ubiquitous, water comets are floating about nearby and metallic asteroids are just waiting to be spun, melted with mirrors and mined for metals?
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Tell me again why I'd want to colonize the bottom of a gravity well when sunshine is ubiquitous, water comets are floating about nearby and metallic asteroids are just waiting to be spun, melted with mirrors and mined for metals?
Don't ask me - I didn't come up with the idea, just pointing out the main problem with self-sustainability on the moon. I agree that there is not much reason to go there, except for the heck of it. As you said, the useful resources are somewhere else. I am not sure about the element composition of the asteroid belt, though - as I pointed out above, you absolutely need a decent supply of N and C for the atmosphere, for chemistry, to sustain your plants. Probably a non-trivial amount of S and P, too. Water an
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The moon has days and nights just like the earth. "The dark side of the moon" is just an album.
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Um. Thanks for emphasizing the point I was making (i.e. sunshine is ubiquitous, in space, not on the moon.)
Re:Habitable Moon (Score:5, Interesting)
The project Orion [wikipedia.org] got shelved because detonating nukes to propel a spacecraft had too much environmental and political problems, but from the Moon none of these problems are relevant. For a reminder, this projects proposes a spacecraft that could weight 100 000 tons, go at 3% of c through a constant 1g acceleration during 10 days. Let's build a godamn shipyard on the moon !
Re:Habitable Moon (Score:4, Informative)
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O2 from electrolysis of water, powered by solar?
something like that. [nasa.gov]
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"Sounds like it might now be vastly easier to establish a self-sustaining moon colony."
Nonetheless, the Moon is a Harsh Mistress.
It's a start (Score:3, Interesting)
Now how much water is in the South Pole?
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Way more than on the moon--and it's got free oxygen, survivable atmospheric pressure, and survivable levels of solar radiation to boot. It's also a helluva lot easier to get to the than the moon.
Sure, the moon will prove less attractive than Antarctica to any rational human settlers, but who DOESN'T want to settle in Antarctica right? Anyone?
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No, just pointing out the lack of a rush to colonize Antarctica as well as the lack of any rational reason for doing so. (Other than national virtual penis enlargement.)
Ice Planet (Score:2)
Won't last long! (Score:2)
When was all this figured out? (Score:2)
I guess it would have been after 1972, because I'd like to think that NASA would have sent some Apollo astronauts to collect some ice samples while they still had the chance. Or was it always known, theoretically, and for whatever reason they decided it could wait, as everyone assumed that if Apollo 21 didn't get around to it, Apollo 86 would.
Sigh. I really miss those days.
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None of the Apollo landing sites were anywhere near the poles. It's more complex (or more fuel dependent) to go into a polar orbit from my understanding, making it tough to put a human-occupied lander there (compared to putting it down near the equator).
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Not to mention that these craters receive no sunlight, making the environment much colder and therefor harsher to both humans and equipment.
Re:When was all this figured out? (Score:4, Informative)
I guess it would have been after 1972, because I'd like to think that NASA would have sent some Apollo astronauts to collect some ice samples while they still had the chance. Or was it always known, theoretically, and for whatever reason they decided it could wait, as everyone assumed that if Apollo 21 didn't get around to it, Apollo 86 would.
Sigh. I really miss those days.
At least RTFS!
"After analyzing data from a radar device aboard last year's Indian Chandrayaan-1"
Chandrayaan-1 only went up a year and a half ago, so yes, this was figured out after 1972.
Daily Show covered this. (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/mon-march-1-2010/neil-degrasse-tyson
Iceberg analogy (Score:2)
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Exploitation (Score:2)
How long until some corporation decides they'll mine all that ice, space-ship it down to Earth, and sell it to yuppies the world over. Moon water! Cures cancer, gets you laid! Get yer Moon water naow !!
Indefinitely stable water? (Score:2)
These areas are very cold and water ice is stable there essentially indefinitely.
Just give us a few years. I can see the ads:
"Experience our jetted tubs in just 1/6th Earth's gravity -- like lying on a table of water."
"Engineers needed to build ice-melting machines to cool Lunar Fission Reactor."
"Don't forget to flush!"
Unfortunately (Score:2)
We're not going there anytime soon... at least from the US.
Great... (Score:2)
If you thought bottled water from Fiji was wasteful...
Who gives a crap (Score:2, Flamebait)
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The short of it is, I'm a science guy and I can see the benefit in taking money from pure science and potentially moving it to buying everyone a new TV.
Fixed that for you.
How much water is this relative to standard use? (Score:2)
So I'd love to know how much water, say, New York City uses in a given time period. Anyone know? Like many of us, I don't know what "600 million metric tons of water" means in practice. Comparing it to some more meaningful figure, like a major city's water usage over one year, would help a lot.
No easy comparison . . . life support systems (Score:2)
It's easy to look up per-capita water usage, and the amount required just to stay alive, etc., but this doesn't give a full picture of the amount of water a person "uses" because you have to take into account his share of industrial and agricultural usage.
When planning a moon base, you'd have to be able to figure these things out way in advance. You'd need some for personal consumption (drinking, cooking, washing), for cooling, for running hydroponic farms and O2 cracking plants, and etc.
You could then figu
Bottled water industry (Score:2)
Following the long tradition of bottling and distributing a substance already readily available to the general public, the bottled water industry has extended their supply chains to include the highly demanded Lunar water.
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But in all seriousness, if you dropped a 600 million metric ton ice cub into the ocean, what would happen?
...you would water it down? ::rimshot::
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Well, the iceberg that just broke off of Antarctica was about 1000 times as large, if that helps.
And if it doesn't help, assuming that it would cause about as much effect as tossing a normal ice cube into an Olympic-sized swimming pool wouldn't be too far off. Though the normal ice-cube in the Olympic-sized pool would cool things down a bit more....
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The first thing that would happen is scientists all over the world would ask you how you managed to marshal the incredible resources needed for such a feat, followed by questions of how you managed to get it through the atmosphere without it breaking up. Next would come the numerous islanders and coastal dwellers looking to string you up from the nearest tree for wiping out large swaths of the coast a
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But in all seriousness, if you dropped a 600 million metric ton ice cub into the ocean, what would happen?
If dropped from the altitude of the moon? Let's see:
I'd guess the result would be catastrophic tsunamis and a few years of disruptive climate effects.
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Re:Don't mine all of them (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Don't mine all of them (Score:4, Insightful)
It's a big rock floating through vacuum. What is there to preserve? There's no ecosystem, no history, no emotional attachment. The only reason I can think of not to use it is that once it's used up, then it's gone, and if you think of an even better way to use it later then it's too late.
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It's not just some big rock; It's the Moon. It's the same Moon that our primate ancestors looked up at in wonder. To say it has no history or emotional impact is profoundly ignorant.
The craters you want to preserve are only visible by satellites orbiting the moon's poles. There is not emotional attachment to them.
If you want something worth preserving, try the Sea of Tranquility, or even prevent anything visible to the naked eye on the side of the moon facing us. Some small craters where we can't see them mean nothing to us compared with the moon and its more recognizable features.
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The presence or absence of water in the craters has had no impact on human history - but I guess you're right that it's *going* to. I suppose it boils down (no pun intended) to how many craters this ice is spread among - if it's thousands, then fencing off a few is an option. If it's three big ones, then good luck getting people to forego that much usable resource.
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I guess they are talking about mass.
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"most of the planet wasn't born yet when it happened"
Yes, there's a joke in there. No, I'm not touching it. ;^)
But, I'll admit: I watched all of the moon landings on television, live. Maybe that's why I'm not going to bash you with the planet's birth. Us old bastards gotta stick together.
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FTFA: 1.3 trillion pounds, or 600 million tons. Dividing by 2*10^3 shouldn't be that difficult.
Then again, this is Slashdot, nobody ever reads TFA!
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Using data from a NASA radar that flew aboard India's Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft, scientists have detected ice deposits near the moon's north pole. NASA's Mini-SAR instrument, a lightweight, synthetic aperture radar, found more than 40 small craters with water ice. The craters range in size from 1 to 9 miles (2 to15 km) in diameter. Although the total amount of ice depends on its thickness in each crater, it's estimated there could be at least 1.3 tri
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The 1.3 million pounds seem to be wrong and fixed in the press release, as it right now lists 1.3 trillion pounds.
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Measuring water as weight seems so totally illogical.
In the metric system: 1 liter of water == 1 kg.
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Idiot (Score:2)
Yeah, it is not like the Chinese, Russians, Indians or even the EU agency wouldn't call the NASA out on this. There is being a skeptic and there is being a blithering idiot. Guess what group you fall into?
Re:Forgive the skepticism (Score:5, Informative)
Obama cancels the plans to return to the moon and about a month later vast quantities of water are suddenly discovered on the moon.
You seem to have a common misconception: NASA only cancelled Constellation, which was a horribly overbudget and behind schedule program designed to build two new rockets which wouldn't have been able to take people to the Moon until sometime in the late 2030s. The newly announced program boosts NASA's budget, and places an emphasis on lowering the cost of spaceflight to LEO and building the technologies needed for sustainable beyond-Earth exploration.
In situ resource utilization (e.g. lunar ice extraction) is one of the new technologies emphasized in the new plans. The old Constellation plans largely defunded this kind of research, as the funds were needed to help prevent the rocket building from getting further behind schedule. The new plans call for a near-term in-space resource extraction demonstrator:
http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/428356main_Exploration.pdf [nasa.gov]
Flagship Technology Demonstrations
Projects selected as in-space, flagship demonstrations will be significant in scale, and offer high potential to demonstrate new capability and reduce the cost of future exploration missions. These missions will demonstrate such critical technologies as in-orbit propellant transfer and storage, inflatable modules, automated/autonomous rendezvous and docking, closed-loop life support systems, and other next generation capabilities key to sustainably exploring deep space.
In FY 2011, NASA will initiate several Flagship Technology Demonstrators, each with an expected lifecycle cost in the $400 million to $1 billion range, over a lifetime of five years or less, with the first flying no later than 2014. In pursuit of these goals, international, commercial, and other government agency partners will be actively pursued as integrated team members where appropriate. ...
In FY 2011, NASA will initiate demonstration projects in the areas of in situ resource utilization (ISRU), autonomous precision landing and hazard avoidance, and advanced in-space propulsion, leading to demonstrations on either robotic precursor or flagship missions.
In Situ Resource Utilization: NASA will fund research in a variety of ISRU activities aimed at using lunar, asteroidal, and Martian materials to produce oxygen and extract water from ice reservoirs. A flight experiment to demonstrate lunar resource prospecting, characterization, and extraction will be considered for testing on a future Flagship Technology Demonstration or robotic precursor exploration mission. Concepts to produce fuel, oxygen, and water from the Martian atmosphere and from subsurface ice will also be explored.
NASA's plans also call for propellant depots in low-Earth orbit, and likely EML-1, a Lagrange point which allows relatively easy access to the Moon, Near-Earth Asteroids, and Mars. Once lunar ice extraction is demonstrated and an EML-1 propellant depot is established, a natural progression is to have automated processing plants on the Moon produce H2 and O2 fuel from lunar ice, which can then get shipped up to the EML-1 depot making access to the inner solar system much easier. The old plan suppressed this sort of research in favor of in-house rocket-building, while the new plan enables sustainable space exploration.
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Can someone tell me why the ice doesn't just turn to gas and vent to space?
It's really, really cold [nytimes.com] in these craters -- they're actually some of the coldest spots in the solar system, at -400F (-240 degrees celsius or a little higher than 30 Kelvin). Ice can remain there for billions of years without sublimation. Heck, you could probably store liquid nitrogen in these craters.