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Moon

Study Suggests Much More Water On the Moon Than Thought (phys.org) 71

Posted by BeauHD from the hide-and-seek dept.
davidwr writes: Two days after the 50th anniversary of the first moon landing, the journal Nature Geoscience published a paper claiming there may be "thick ice deposits inside permanently shadowed simple craters" on the moon. The paper compares craters on the moon to similar craters on Mercury that are known to contain thick ice deposits. While the article is paywalled, the dataset, code, references, and supplemental information are available on the abstract's page. If the researchers' ideas prove correct, it would mean that there are millions of tons of ice on the surface of the moon -- far more than has been thought by most moon scientists.
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Study Suggests Much More Water On the Moon Than Thought More

Study Suggests Much More Water On the Moon Than Thought

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  • Well, sure (Score:5, Funny)

    by SEE ( 7681 ) on Wednesday July 24, 2019 @02:37AM (#58977258) Homepage

    There's very little thought on the Moon. It's easy for there to be much more water.

    • I'm given to understand that there's even less inference than thought. Four digit ID? I smell Moon-man.

    • There's very little thought on the Moon. It's easy for there to be much more water.

      At least when the theme park gets built they will be able to have a log flume or two.

    • There's very little thought on the Moon.

      There's not much more on Earth either.

  • Well don't worry (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Viol8 ( 599362 ) on Wednesday July 24, 2019 @03:32AM (#58977376) Homepage

    If humanity ever gets to the point of mining it it won't be there for long. Our track record with natural resources is pretty appalling and there's no reason to think this would change on another planet.

    • Resource discovery sometime leads to accelerating discovery and exploitation of even more. ( and ultimately to its replacdment by newer resource paradigms. tak
      Ecoal for an unfortunate example. A little coal exploitation led to steam power and steel which led to vastly greater coal explotatation. And now we can hopefully move beyond coal. so a a limited amount of acid on thr moon leads to... ad astra ?

    • Well, if grain was shipped to earth, via catapult, a tonne for tonne replacement could be done.

  • Poor Dumb Me (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Jim Sadler ( 5963822 )
    Somehow i don't see how ice or water could exist in a vacuum. Hey kids! Try this one at home. Get a bell jar and a vacuum pump and put a block of ice inside and pull a vacuum. Oops, where did the ice go ? Maybe aliens have installed an atmosphere on the moon. Short of that looking for ice will be disappointing.

    • Re:Poor Dumb Me (Score:5, Informative)

      by Viol8 ( 599362 ) on Wednesday July 24, 2019 @04:51AM (#58977580) Homepage

      Odd how all the ice moons of jupiter and saturn still exist after billions of years isn't it not to mention saturns rings which are almost entirely made of ice. Clue - for ice to sublime it needs a certain amount of heat.

      It amazes me quite how many scientifically clueless clowns lread a technical site like this. Are you a web dev by any chance?

      • > It amazes me quite how many scientifically clueless clowns lread a technical site like this. Are you a web dev by any chance?

        So you're implying that all web devs are clowns just because they are web devs ? Well you must be a fucking fun person to be around with. Nah.. you're just a bitter twat.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Viol8 ( 599362 )

          Web development has taken over from VB as the baby walker of the programming world. A lot of people start off there but most eventually move on to grown up languages like C++, C# or Java. The ones that don't are either graphic designers out of their depth or just useless coders.

          • "Web development has taken over from VB as the baby walker of the programming world."

            Ha ha... I like that one!

            "A lot of people start off there but most eventually move on to grown up languages like C++, C# or Java."

            WERP? You just included Java as a "grown up" language? yea, I don't think I would call Java a mature anything other than a bastardized language being mangled everywhere it goes.

            Though I will agree with your comment about useless coders, there are a lot of those around and probably the biggest r

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by dfghjk ( 711126 )

          "So you're implying that all web devs are clowns just because they are web devs ?"

          He did not say this, though it would be unsurprising to learn that a web dev would think so.

    • The water isn't in a vacuum. It is trapped under tons of rock or bonded as subsurface hydrates.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mark-t ( 151149 )

      Had you considered the temperature that your bell jar was a factor in that experimental result?

      Liquid water can't exist in a vacuum, but solid ice certainly can... if it's cold enough, and places on the moon that don't get sunlight are *definitely* cold enough.

  • Finally! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Now I know where to start my whaling business.

    • Now I know where to start my whaling business.

      Good news is, the whales will be easy to catch since the water is frozen as ice; they can't swim away.

  • OK. Go get it.
  • we still don't know if it's made from skim, part skim, or whole milk.

  • Just ask the Nazi, they built a base there in the 1980's. Surely they found something in the last four decades.

  • Paywalls? (Score:3)

    by johnsie ( 1158363 ) on Wednesday July 24, 2019 @08:29AM (#58978352)
    In a world where information is generally free, a paywall seems to be a very desperate way to get money, while at the same time scaring away your site visitors. I wonder how long paywalls will be used and what kind of numbers they get for paying customers. I see no point in paying for information or news that I can easily get for free elsewhere.
  • If these crater floors are in permanent shadow, solar panels would be useless, and radio connection becomes a problem. I doubt a sample could be done by the kind of rover Chandrayaan-2 has. Some water ice has probably survived underground in more accessible areas as well, at depths where neither volcanic heat nor sunlight would melt it.
    • Yeah, until someone invents batteries, lack of direct solar exposure will be a real problem!

      • Yeah, until someone invents batteries, lack of direct solar exposure will be a real problem!

        We're running low on plutonium for those batteries.

  • Ignore this post (Score:3)

    by doug141 ( 863552 ) on Wednesday July 24, 2019 @09:54AM (#58978892)

    need to fix a fat finger mod.

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