backtop

Print E-mail del.icio.us 37 comment(s) - last by mmcdonalataocd.. on Nov 17 at 7:30 AM

The LCROSS probe launched in June, with the goal of discovery water.  (Source: NASA)

The probe carried high tech instruments aboard it to scan for the presence of water.  (Source: NASA)

The probe successfully launched its impacter on October 9, and flew through the plume. Subsequently analysis of its readings revealed abundant levels of water.  (Source: NASA)
The word finally comes about the latest round of Moon studies

On June 18, NASA's Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, or LCROSS mission lifted off aboard an Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral, FL.  With a body designed by Northrop Grumman and instruments designed by NASA's Ames Research Center (ARC), the spacecraft succeeded in sending an impact module slamming into the moon's southern Lunar crater Cabeus.

The Shepherding Rocket then flew through the over 350 tons of excavated material, relaying readings back to Earth, before making its own crash-landing on the Lunar surface.  After a month of analysis, NASA announced the results at a triumphant press conference at NASA's Ames Research Center at Moffett Field near San Francisco, California.

Describes NASA scientist Anthony Colaprete, "I'm here today to tell you that indeed, yes, we found water. And we didn't find just a little bit; we found a significant amount."

He says an estimated dozen two-gallon buckets of water (in other words, approximately 24 gallons of water) was detected in the excavated debris -- a significant amount of water.  This provides the most compelling evidence to date in the long running debate over whether the Moon has water frozen in its rocky soil.  The composition was analyzed using spectrometers onboard the tailing rocket.

While the future of NASA's Ares program remains in jeopardy thanks to questions concerning its budget and viability, NASA officials couldn't have asked for a much better way to kick off our nation's plan to return to the moon.  At $79M USD, the mission was a critical one to the program, and it delivered.

The Lunar water is significant as it improves our nation's chances of being able to set up a successful Lunar colony, one of the goals of our proposed return to the Moon, first proposed by former President George W. Bush, and now championed by current President Barack Obama.  While resources would still be tight, Lunar water could be used to reduce the amount of materials necessary to be transported from Earth to the prospective colony.

A new puzzle is how the Lunar water came to the Moon in the first place.  Michael Wargo, chief lunar scientist at NASA headquarters in Washington suggests that potentials sources include solar winds, comets, giant molecular clouds or even the moon itself through some kind of internal activity. 

He states, "If the water that was formed or deposited is billions of years old, these polar cold traps could hold a key to the history and evolution of the solar system, much as an ice core sample taken on Earth reveals ancient data. In addition, water and other compounds represent potential resources that could sustain future lunar exploration."

Comments     Threshold


Imagine if we pooled the worlds military budget
By dark matter on 11/14/2009 8:47:45 AM , Rating: 2
Imagine if we pooled the worlds military budget and instead of using resources building nukes, bombs, bomber planes and guns, tanks, subs and barracks we spent it all in developing space travel.

Imagine where we could be if we did so as a collective and not have capitalism (consumerism?) pit nation against nation. We have the stars in ours, it all depends if we can stop bashing each other in the head with rocks for 5 minutes.




RE: Imagine if we pooled the worlds military budget
By Eris23007 on 11/14/2009 12:03:49 PM , Rating: 4
Yeah, and then we could all join hands around the campfire and sing "Kumbaya" while making s'mores and hot chocolate...

...right up until there's only two s'mores left and ten people who want them.

Conflict is a fact of human interaction in any scenario involving finite resources - in other words, everything. Nations have already tried your suggestion (collectivism) and failed miserably due to a pervasive inability to effectively allocate limited resources. Capitalism has its ugliness but it works and is by far the most effective means of limiting overall poverty. Capitalism is also best supported with a strong culture of philanthropy to offset some of that ugliness.

In summary, please take a dose of reality. Idealism is great and all, and everybody wishes we could spend less fighting over how to divide the resources, but so long as resources (food, water, oil, raw materials such as iron ore, etc.) are limited, a system for efficiently allocating those resources is required. Say hello to the free market, it's a heck of a lot more efficient than the guns and tanks of which you complain.

Interesting thing is, in modern history free-market-capitalist countries are far less likely to attack other countries over resources, compared to collectivist or totalitarian countries; they usually find it cheaper to just buy what they need...


RE: Imagine if we pooled the worlds military budget
By JediJeb on 11/16/2009 2:36:19 PM , Rating: 2
If Iraq was invaded for their oil, then why isn't our gasoline now priced at $0.50 per gallon? Was the invasion totally for unselfish reasons, no, but bringing stability to the region benefits everybody. And no, I don't just listen to the news, I listen to many people I know who have serverd over there, and what they tell is nothing like what is on the news when it comes to whether or not the people wanted us over there. Most returning vets I know will tell you the average person in Iraq is happy that we did what we did. Living in a war is one thing, but having to live in a time of "peace" while always in fear that you could be killed tomorrow because of something you said or did or just because you were in the wrong place at the wrong time like it was under Sadam's rule is far worse than the war was.


By RubberJohnny on 11/17/2009 1:52:41 AM , Rating: 1
Iraq was invaded so that Bush and his cronies could make a shit tin of cold hard cash...

BTW The Kurds were happy to see Sadam go, the rest of them would probably prefer to have their loved ones back that got killed when the 'coallition of the willing' 'liberated them'


By MrPoletski on 11/17/2009 5:49:11 AM , Rating: 2
quote:
If Iraq was invaded for their oil, then why isn't our gasoline now priced at $0.50 per gallon?


Because:

a) it would never achieve that price anyway

b) it takes years and years to go from empty bit of desert to oil producing facility.

c) Oil companies have only just started going in proper anyway. oil refineries and RPG's don't mix.

The invasion was entirely about controlling the supply of oil. Not owning it, controlling it. With dozens of permenant military bases in and around the worlds largest oil supplier, nobody is gonna have the power to hold the USA to fuel ransom.

Of course, the main obstacle to that goal changed from Iraq to Iran some time ago, as they have the strait of hormuz.


By mindless1 on 11/14/2009 12:10:27 PM , Rating: 2
Ok John Lennon, but imagine that the far more important reason to pool the world's budget would be to fix the problems here, not just travel into space with the same policies that perpetuate them.

Imagine that travel into space has to be for a particular reason, 'site-seeing in itself would get old after a few thousands of years of looking at stars through the window.

Lastly, the idea that we only need throw enough money into development and it would magically overcome the speed-of-light/distance factor, is probably a false one. Some things that people daydream about don't become more real simply because they wish it were so.

Let me present another possibility. If another species does as you suggest and comes upon our planet needing it's resources because they exhausted their own during space travel, wouldn't you like it if we could defend the planet?

The answer is to not put all your eggs in one basket. Space travel should be more of a priority but certainly not to the extent you suggest. Do you feel we'd travel to some nirvana or isn't it probably nicer for habitation on the planet that we evolutionarily adapted to for quite a long time?

Maybe, just maybe the funds should be put towards keeping this planet habitable instead.


By mmcdonalataocdotgov on 11/17/2009 7:30:16 AM , Rating: 2
War is an extension of culture, not politics or economic theories.


Perspective
By geddarkstorm on 11/13/2009 3:44:28 PM , Rating: 5
To give a little meaning behind the 100 kilograms (100 liters) of water vapor/ice they detected (mostly vapor), a person on average loses 80 ounces, or ~2.4 liters, of water from their body a day, with half of that being returned in their food. So, a person can survive on 1 liter of drinking water a day. In a 20 meter crater, which they only got a small windowed snapshot of the content of, they found enough water to allow one person to survive for 100 days. And that's without recycling technology.

If one had enough power supply, recycling of water can be almost complete, meaning a sustainable base can be formed for months on this amount alone.

The only real question that remains is what form is this water in? We now know that some proportion is in crystalline ice, but is the rest easily extractable? And how uniform is it in that crater and others?

With enough water available, a moon base can also mine it for rocket fuel, allowing a refueling station of sorts to be set up that would allow easier access to the solar system for us.

This is all kinds of cool. I can't wait to see what is reveled with more data analysis.




RE: Perspective
By scrapsma54 on 11/13/2009 4:01:22 PM , Rating: 3
A lot of area's of study can benefit from waste processing. If this effort to make a moon base might throw our technology 10-20 forward.


RE: Perspective
By geddarkstorm on 11/13/2009 4:07:19 PM , Rating: 5
Really, it isn't as hard as it sounds. It's just very energy intensive (or resource intensive if you use filters instead of distillation). We already have a distiller that can purify water from raw sewage at 100 gallons per day.

However, people do more with water than just drink. Astronauts are more disciplined by necessity, but here on Earth we live very plush, using 50 gallons of water per day for things like showers and the toilet. That's a lot more than we need for /survival/, it's all about /comfort/. And then, there's the issue with a city having thousands of people using all that much, now you have to do batch distillation and the processing costs start to sky rocket.

A moon base would be a very limited amount of people, using most likely space station like tech for hygiene and waste. That is quite efficient.

Still, if this can spur even better innovations, especially for batch reclamation of water at lower energy/resource costs, that would have immediate benefits for everyone. And the necessary solutions to problems presented by going to space has already proven to advance us in all areas of technology rapidly.


RE: Perspective
By delphinus100 on 11/14/09, Rating: -1
RE: Perspective
By modus2 on 11/14/2009 12:53:30 AM , Rating: 2
"There's no value in 'refueling' there. "

Apart from the fact that the lunar gravity well is far shallower than earths. You´d only need to lift enough fuel to get to the moon from the surface of the earth.


RE: Perspective
By delphinus100 on 11/15/09, Rating: -1
Drilling for water
By drrockf4d on 11/13/2009 3:48:04 PM , Rating: 2
Just wait for the environmentalists to say it is a limited resource and we should not touch it or deplete it and sue NASA for destroying the environment with their reckless missions.




RE: Drilling for water
By geddarkstorm on 11/13/2009 3:50:11 PM , Rating: 3
Urg. Water doesn't just disappear. As long as it isn't taken off planet (or moon), it's still there. It may just need to be re-purified at the cost of energy to be drinkable again, but that's it.


RE: Drilling for water
By ClownPuncher on 11/13/2009 4:00:45 PM , Rating: 1
Because when you pee it out, it evaporates, and the clouds in the Moons atmosphere absorb it and rain it back down?

/s


RE: Drilling for water
By geddarkstorm on 11/13/2009 4:02:33 PM , Rating: 1
Well, on the other hand, pee is still water, just a solution with some added compounds in it :P


RE: Drilling for water
By ClownPuncher on 11/13/2009 4:21:04 PM , Rating: 4
Get my bendy straw!


RE: Drilling for water
By geddarkstorm on 11/13/2009 4:23:34 PM , Rating: 2
Don't forget the mini paper umbrella


So there is water, why there isn't any life
By nofumble62 on 11/14/09, Rating: 0
By piroroadkill on 11/14/2009 12:00:49 PM , Rating: 5
Probably because the Moon has no atmosphere


RE: So there is water, why there isn't any life
By mindless1 on 11/14/09, Rating: -1
RE: So there is water, why there isn't any life
By nofumble62 on 11/14/2009 12:39:08 PM , Rating: 2
For other species, it happens slowly.

...Did I read the other day, women worldwide are "getting shorter and chubbier"?


RE: So there is water, why there isn't any life
By mindless1 on 11/15/2009 12:33:49 PM , Rating: 2
Yes, and it was kind of silly poor research. They're getting fatter because there's ample food in the study region and machines to do more of the manual labor formerly done.

It's not that skinny women are at a disadvantage unless it's very cold, it's that a larger % of them are getting fat. Men too.


By FPP on 11/15/2009 12:46:34 PM , Rating: 2
How do you know there isn't any life? Until now we didn't know there was any water.


By Manch on 11/15/2009 6:35:57 PM , Rating: 2
So by telling my girl to get her @ss in the kitchen and make me some pie, I'm actually helping her stay fit! I wonder how many calories she burns fetching me beers?


EUREKA!
By Sahrin on 11/13/2009 3:53:53 PM , Rating: 5
Water means grass...grass means cows...cows mean milk...milk means MOON CHEESE OMG!!!

Kidding aside, at this point I will be absolutely beside myself if we don't get Constellation (or some form thereof) and a permanent moon base. Come on! You're bailing out seniors, children, banks, people without insurance, people with insurance that didn't want new insurance - give me moon cheese! Robotic exploration is very cool, but doesn't approach what real scientists in can learn (like eating moon cheese) standing on the real moon wearing real boots. Let's broaden our horizons a little bit. Also, Moon Hope is up to three times more powerful than standard terrestrial hope.




RE: EUREKA!
By Randomblame on 11/13/09, Rating: -1
RE: EUREKA!
By hiscross on 11/15/09, Rating: 0
RE: EUREKA!
By MrPoletski on 11/16/2009 9:14:33 AM , Rating: 2
God put the water on the moon huh?

yup thats an incredibly useful statement that will help us understand tons of things about how it got there.

I hear there are ACORNS on the moon so that obviously means that God elected Obama to destroy the USA....

no WAIT... maybe I'm talking total RUBBISH!


RE: EUREKA!
By Hawkido on 11/16/2009 4:57:11 PM , Rating: 2
You made me laugh till Moon Milk came out of my nose.


Something tells me
By ShaolinSoccer on 11/14/2009 12:21:20 AM , Rating: 1
that our moon is nothing but a big comet. Afterall, we have known for a long time that comets have ice. It wouldn't surprise me if the moon did contain a lot of ice/water...




RE: Something tells me
By AyashiKaibutsu on 11/15/2009 6:19:06 PM , Rating: 2
The moon isn't a comet and never was a comet. It either formed with the earth or afterwards from debris of a giant impact (planet sized not comet sized).


Source of water...
By lainofthewired on 11/13/2009 4:40:11 PM , Rating: 2
If the best accepted hypothesis of the moon's formation is the giant impact, wouldn't that be a good explanation of where the water came from? The Earth? I know the Earth wasn't anything back then like it is now, but it would still have water in some form on it. And maybe there was water on the body that impacted the Earth, too.

I know they're all thinking this, and they need proof before saying anything, but they make it sound like they have absolutely no clue where it came from...




That's not water...
By ggordonliddy on 11/13/2009 8:09:50 PM , Rating: 2
That is Moon Man spooge. Beware ye who drink of it!




We attacked first!
By Icehearted on 11/17/2009 1:33:06 AM , Rating: 2
What will we do when the moon returns fire?!




"You can bet that Sony built a long-term business plan about being successful in Japan and that business plan is crumbling." -- Peter Moore, 24 hours before his Microsoft resignation

DailyTech Poll
Which web browser do you use on your primary personal machine? 






44 Comments









botimage
Copyright 2009 DailyTech LLC. - RSS Feed | Advertise | About Us | Ethics | FAQ | Terms, Conditions & Privacy Information | Kristopher Kubicki