NASA: the Moon is a hydrated mistress NASA's LCROSS probe has confirmed the presence of water on the lunar surface, including buckets of the stuff in a shadowed crater near the moon's south pole. "Indeed, yes, we found water," said LCROSS principal investigator Anthony Colaprete said during a news conference today at NASA's Ames Research Center. "And we didn't …
I say, we think that some of the stuff in the dark part of the moon
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might be a few billion years old and we were wondering what to do with it.
Vye dont vee smasch a meesile in 2 ze meedst ov eet and see wot flize oop yes?
Dood, that iz soo kool! Yeh, we kin do it, Funding onstreem.
Boot vot about any posheebl kontanimayshun zat ze strow oop mite makenzee?
IIRC, it costs a couple hundred thousand dollars to ship a 1kg mass into space. Given that a 2 gallon (US) bucket of water should weigh 7.57kg, it's rather more expensive than anyone really wants to deal with if possible.
Presumably, you're not actually interested in shipping water back from the moon.
This is really good news!
However, as this water is now a natural resource on the moon. How long till get get the Gray-brigade (the moon isnt Green now is it? ) telling us that we cant use the natrural resourse as its not sustainable.
"Leave mother moon alone!" i can hear them cry.
bloody Graypeace...*mumble*
Google says that the total surface of the moon is 153 million square meters of which 14 thousand square meters is in permanent shadow. So there probably isn't that much moon water that can be easily extracted. Probably best not to squander it.
Oops - sorry - that should read, in internationally approved El Reg units, 5011.7383 Belgiums and 0.4586 Belgiums respectively (give or take a few milliWales).
Is currently unknown. Space Adventures (IIRC) are offering a personal lunar flyby at c$20m so assuming a typical Merkin passenger at 100kg (to keep the math simple) that would be $200k/kg.
However the NASA kids website, explaining the ISS golden show processing system said they put it in because water is roughly $20k/litre.
The latest copy of Spaceflight has an article on the ESA "Melissa" closed cycle life support project. This gives figures for daily human consumable and estimates a trip to Mars would need about 95tonnes with an open cycle (open, hydrate, crap, dump) system.
You can guess what's in my pocket.
Now, a few lines of thought here that sort of collide.
a) NASA is following the rule follow the water to find life in the universe.
b) NASA came back from the moon and said there was no life.
c) NASA et all now say moon has water all over it in different amounts.
d) Apollo equipment et all is covered in this stuff, and is on general display in various places.
I can remember long cues at the Smithsonian institute Washington to 'touch' a bit of moon rock.
Does that mean that we have all been exposed to moon bugs in the water they bought back with them ?
CIA / Black opps , X files on hold here !
but I don't think this is a cause for rejoicing.
We've always assumed there was SOME water on the Moon - there's SOME everywhere, bound into crystals and the like. What we had hoped for in a shaded crater was sheets of solid water ice. And getting 24 gallons out of a kiloton-sized explosion is a very small amount - you would get more out of the Sahara sand.
There still might be solid water ice on the Moon, but I don't think we found it with this experiment. And if this is all there is, I suspect we will be hauling water up from Earth for quite a while yet....
".......some sort of long hose taking advantage of earth's gravitational pull would be much more efficient."
Don't be silly. With that level of siphonic pressure you'd never stop it once started. There'd be a long, loud sucking noise, the moon would shrink and the Earth's water levels would rise dramatically*. The sudden shift in mass between Moon and Earth would destabilise the system causing The End Of The World**.
*Pissing off the Carbon Cultists who think they have a monopoly on this one.
**Quite possibly due to some crustal instability CGI bollocks.
..but water generally has organisms on it. Where as this could be good news, it could also mean bad. Yes, Dr. W-who was on last night ("Waters of Mars"), but thinking of it rationally, I'm not talking about Alien Posessions et al. I'm more concerned with further organisms that might contaminate our already contaminated water supply here on Earth.
I say we set up Moon Base Alpha and do tests on it. I vote for being Tony Verdeschi (RIP)
A dozen 7.6 litre buckets in a 20-30m crater. Solve for ppm.
Volume of a spherical cup (crater) is given by the formula
V = \frac{2}{3} \pi r^2 h
where r is the radius of the crater, and h its height. Let r = 10 and h = 6, for a crater formed by a 90 degree impact.
V = 1,256,637 litres
ergo this portion of the moon is approx 72 ppm water by volume.
It seems unlikely, therefore, that the regolith is similar to any kind of cheese known on Earth.
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