Water Found on Moon After Lcross Impact

Terry Olaes

Terry Olaes

I Used to be the [H] News Guy
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NASA’s Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (Lcross) mission has confirmed what scientists long suspected: there is water on the moon. This bodes well for proponents of a lunar installation and for those that hope the accumulation of ice contains clues to the solar systems history.

The satellite, known as Lcross (pronounced L-cross), slammed into a crater near the Moon’s south pole a month ago. The impact carved out a hole 60- to 100-feet wide and kicked up at least 24 gallons of water.
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I was on the stance of blowing up the moon, but I guess its worth keeping now
 
Now we just need beer and space will be ours! Interesting find but then I guess water could be pretty common in the cosmos and we just don't know yet.
 
I wonder how overclocking will be like on the moon if the PC is outside of the confined space the astronauts need to survive.
 
24 gallons from a 60ft hole... sounds like there is a LOT of water up there. plenty of solar power too... a few fuel cells and youre all set.
 
next stage of exploration, been reading about this for about 10 years.
So happy that it's real


The next step...
 
The next step should be building a space dock so we can assemble our long range ships in space rather than building them on Earth and watch them waste 90% of their fuel getting off the planet.

I'm thinking space elevator to that dock, or perhaps a space elevator from the moon to the dock to carry hydro fuel up there.
 
Azhar said:
The next step should be building a space dock so we can assemble our long range ships in space rather than building them on Earth and watch them waste 90% of their fuel getting off the planet.

I'm thinking space elevator to that dock, or perhaps a space elevator from the moon to the dock to carry hydro fuel up there.
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Was reading about that in Arthur C Clarke's book. IIRC NASA did an experiment a couple of years ago with nano thread hung down from a shuttle as a first test.

Slowly but surely
 
Azhar said:
The next step should be building a space dock so we can assemble our long range ships in space rather than building them on Earth and watch them waste 90% of their fuel getting off the planet.

I'm thinking space elevator to that dock, or perhaps a space elevator from the moon to the dock to carry hydro fuel up there.
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NO! The next step always begins with lasers!
 
This could be a big boost for the current Ares program vision. As I said back in the Ares I-X launch thread, Obama was waiting for these results before making any decisions about the program. It migh be easier to visit an asteroid, but water on the moon makes a moon base a more desirable option.
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24 gallons of water in a ~60ft hole? There are millions of places here on earth where you couldn't get that. Wtf?!
 
The only way to get Americans interested in going back to the moon is to host American Idol there, otherwise our ADHD kicks in and we...GLITTER...PUPPIES...
 
This is pretty exciting. With this find, a moon base is a lot more realistic now.
 
MrValentine said:
No iron core = no magnetic field = dead humans from solar radiation

damn Ive been watching The Universe to much!!!!
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Yeah, and terraforming kinda defeats the purpose of space exploration anyway. We need to learn how to survive in extreme environments, even if that means making space colonies for the next few centuries. The good news is, if we can get the formula down for human survival on the moon, then it makes it that much easier to build colonies on Mars and elsewhere.
 
Besides the magnetic field issue the Moon is too small. It doesn't have enough mass to hold an Earth like atmosphere for more than a few million years. Earth is the only terrestrial body in the solar system with enough mass to prevent all gasses from escaping into space. This is one of the problems with Venus and Mars; not enough mass to retain hydrogen following planet formation = no oceans -> dead planets.

Now, if we could crash Venus and Mars into each other...
 
DeathFromBelow said:
Besides the magnetic field issue the Moon is too small. It doesn't have enough mass to hold an Earth like atmosphere for more than a few million years. Earth is the only terrestrial body in the solar system with enough mass to prevent all gasses from escaping into space. This is one of the problems with Venus and Mars; not enough mass to retain hydrogen following planet formation = no oceans -> dead planets.

Now, if we could crash Venus and Mars into each other...
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I assume you mean "rocky planets," because, well, the gas giants would beg to differ. And actually Venus and Mars (to a lesser degree) are massive enough to hold onto an atmosphere. The problem, as pointed out, is that any planet without a good magnetic field will be susceptible to having its atmosphere "burned off" by solar radiation. Venus is actually quite similar compositionally to Earth. It's just a bit too close to the sun to have liquid oceans.
 
ordovician said:
I assume you mean "rocky planets," because, well, the gas giants would beg to differ.
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I said "terrestrial bodies." ;)

And actually Venus and Mars (to a lesser degree) are massive enough to hold onto an atmosphere.
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Yes, as is Saturn's moon Titan. The point I made is that Earth is the only terrestrial planet in the solar system that is large enough to retain hydrogen after formation. Less hydrogen = less water = no oceans.

The problem, as pointed out, is that any planet without a good magnetic field will be susceptible to having its atmosphere "burned off" by solar radiation. Venus is actually quite similar compositionally to Earth. It's just a bit too close to the sun to have liquid oceans.
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Venus doesn't have a magnetic field (well, almost no field), and at 82% Earth's mass it isn't wasn't massive enough to trap gaseous hydrogen. You are correct though, its proximity to the sun and many other factors keep it from being Earthlike.
 
Ok, maybe I am dense. I fail to see exactly how this was 'the' hurdle in seriously going to the moon. Yes, water is heavy and getting enough up there would have been a problem, but I think they would have recycled it heavily if we went there for any length of time. The issue still remains, in my eyes, the shear volume of heavy material we would have to put into orbit to build any sort of sustainable facility. We can't do that cheaply or without wasting massive amounts of fuel. Even if we wanted to, I am not sure we could throw enough stuff up there. *shrug*
 
havand said:
Ok, maybe I am dense. I fail to see exactly how this was 'the' hurdle in seriously going to the moon. Yes, water is heavy and getting enough up there would have been a problem, but I think they would have recycled it heavily if we went there for any length of time. The issue still remains, in my eyes, the shear volume of heavy material we would have to put into orbit to build any sort of sustainable facility. We can't do that cheaply or without wasting massive amounts of fuel. Even if we wanted to, I am not sure we could throw enough stuff up there. *shrug*
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It's simple: you really don't understand the scale of the problem. Fuel and Water are a much bigger cost-to-orbit problem than you think. Being able to synthesize fuel, and having water available on-site is a lot more significant than you realize. Believe it. Recycling isn't enough to sustain prolonged, long-term efforts to establish the Moon as a base of operations. You've read it but, yeah, you just don't believe it or something. Unless you yourself are a PhD astrophysicist or engineer then you might try just believing NASA experts who say things.

This discovery of massive amounts of water on the moon is the biggest news of human history since we crawled out of the slime.
 
Earley said:
It's simple: you really don't understand the scale of the problem. Fuel and Water are a much bigger cost-to-orbit problem than you think. Being able to synthesize fuel, and having water available on-site is a lot more significant than you realize. Believe it. Recycling isn't enough to sustain prolonged, long-term efforts to establish the Moon as a base of operations. You've read it but, yeah, you just don't believe it or something. Unless you yourself are a PhD astrophysicist or engineer then you might try just believing NASA experts who say things.

This discovery of massive amounts of water on the moon is the biggest news of human history since we crawled out of the slime.
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QFT.

And it's even bigger than that.
With water on the moon, that means that we can get a base there and move our launching capabilities there.
The cost of sending out satelittes/spacecrafts/buildingblocks form the moon (with 1/6 the gravity and no drag from atmosphere) is way lower than anything we can achive from earth...and not needing to ship fuel/water from earth.

Hell, imagine a "rail-gun" sytsem on the moon...powered by solarpower :eek:
 
I understand that. You still have to get the spaceship/materials there or the equipment to make the ships there. Which, is still astronomically ridiculous.
 
krupted said:
24 gallons from a 60ft hole... sounds like there is a LOT of water up there. plenty of solar power too... a few fuel cells and youre all set.
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Plenty of solar power? Not really much more than here, sure we have an atmosphere that blocks some light, however with no atmosphere in direct sunlight you're talking upwards of 200+F which would reduce the efficiency of solar cells.

Then there's that whole deal about it being tidally locked with Earth, so you'd really only have sunlight for half the month... well at least it'd be all day sunlight. Hope you have plenty of batteries :D
 
havand said:
Ok, maybe I am dense. I fail to see exactly how this was 'the' hurdle in seriously going to the moon. Yes, water is heavy and getting enough up there would have been a problem, but I think they would have recycled it heavily if we went there for any length of time. The issue still remains, in my eyes, the shear volume of heavy material we would have to put into orbit to build any sort of sustainable facility. We can't do that cheaply or without wasting massive amounts of fuel. Even if we wanted to, I am not sure we could throw enough stuff up there. *shrug*
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I think you miss the point.

Water = fuel....
 
havand said:
I understand that. You still have to get the spaceship/materials there or the equipment to make the ships there. Which, is still astronomically ridiculous.
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Depends on how much you can fabricate on the Moon.
With no water everything from water to dirt would have to be shipped from Earth...making it venture far into the future.

Water on the Moon just moved that future very much closer.
 
DeathFromBelow said:
Besides the magnetic field issue the Moon is too small. It doesn't have enough mass to hold an Earth like atmosphere for more than a few million years. Earth is the only terrestrial body in the solar system with enough mass to prevent all gasses from escaping into space. This is one of the problems with Venus and Mars; not enough mass to retain hydrogen following planet formation = no oceans -> dead planets.

Now, if we could crash Venus and Mars into each other...
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Not true, hydrogen is just too light to exist in our atmosphere. The mean velocity of hydrogen at Earth like temperatures exceeds the escape velocity on Earth. Most all of the solar nebula hydrogen boiled away very rapidly after the creation of the Earth. The water on Earth came from outgassing of rocks due to the molten state of Earth, not because hydrogen in our atmosphere reacted with oxygen to form water.

Venus has a plenty big atmosphere, again outgassing, it lacks a magnetic field though most likely because the inside is so hot it can't support a solid core for dynamo action.

With Mars it lacks a magnetic field because it most likely cooled down a long time ago, that's what's keeping its atmosphere minimized now. True it couldn't hold a nice Earth like atmosphere either, but at colder temperatures it probably could. Mars has water on it, frozen in the ice caps, in the permafrost, and thought to have had on the surface at one time. The entire surface is oxidized too, so oxygen in some form had to have existed there, Earth is the same way, we need things to keep creating it or it would oxidize with everything in sight that is the only real reason we have oxygen on the planet today is due to photosynthetic organisms.
 
ack no edit.

that should say hydrogen is too light to exist in our atmosphere (in any appreciable amount)

and Venus if you tossed it out around Mars' location, I'd expect a vastly different evolutionary path it would have taken. The surface gravity is still 90% of Earth's after all.
 
havand said:
I understand that. You still have to get the spaceship/materials there or the equipment to make the ships there. Which, is still astronomically ridiculous.
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I don't think you do. The availability of water on site has a much bigger impact on the difficulty than what you think is already astronomically difficult. You aren't seeing the scale. What you see as now as astronomically difficult with water, was actually totally impossible before. And with water it is now totally possible, and merely difficult, not even ridiculously so.
 
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