NASA study of moon soil reveals plentiful water

[DreamSmoker]

Source: NASA

When the last Apollo astronauts walked on the moon 40 years ago, they carried home a curious collection of lunar pebbles, rocks and soil.

Now those volcanic samples of the ancient lunar crust reveal that the arid moon's interior holds far more water than scientists had believed.

It's wetter in the moon's interior, in fact, than a mission from Moffett Field discovered less than two years ago when a spacecraft bombed a crater near the moon's south pole with an empty rocket casing and blasted up tiny particles of water ice from the crater's deeply shadowed darkness.

Research teams from three institutions, all affiliated with NASA's Lunar Science Institute at the Ames Research Center in Mountain View, reported Thursday they have found relatively copious quantities of water inside tiny glass fragments that erupted from lunar volcanoes long ago.



Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/05/26/BA011JLELO.DTL

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The real truth is with our Government..
WE have known about this for all these years... TOP Secret...
Its by design that others are getting credit for this find in recent days....

[Viking 1]

1. No cheese?

:tinfoilhat:

[backscatter712]

2. How hard would it be to recover some of this water?

At the Moon's south pole, where the crater hit gave us evidence of lots of ice, that would be an ideal place to set up a moon base or colony.

But how about elsewhere? Just from the top of my head, I seriously doubt you could drill a well on the Moon and get anything resembling water. Could you extract it from lunar rock?

[Urban Prairie]

3. Considering Moon probably passed through and likely was struck often by particles

from the tails of comets and icy cometary debris, discovering plenty of water-ice in it isn't that much or big of a surprise, IMO. I truly believe that comets are the universe's means of seeding "life" upon hospitable planets.

[comtec]

4. So WHY havent we had a lunar base for the last 30 years?!

Seriously, a international lunar base could have done amazing things for silence and mankind in general, and it could have had local air, water, and hydrogen!!!
Not to mention all the solar power ever needed!

It just frustrates me.
It feels like whoever is driving our government wants the human race to just die!

[ThomWV]

8. The reason we have no lunar base is because our space program has no customer for it

Our entire space program is designed to satisfy a customer, usually the military, and if there is no customer there is no room for an independent goal for the Agency. For almost every purpose it is cheaper for NASA's customers to put little moons of their own design into orbits of their choosing to optimize the Man-made-moon's attendant spyware. Of all our space shot and all the junk we have hurled into space, what percentage of it do you suppose was purely military in nature, mostly for targeting or spying, and most of the classified.

That's what our space program is about, not the myth of extending man's knowledge and exploring the stars. Its not about mining on distant moons and planets or finding life or solving the mysteries of the cosmos. The thing that kicked us in the butt the first time was the Soviet launch of Sputnik, which showed us they were close (Sputnik weighed less than 100 kilos) to having the capability to launch a nuclear weapon. That's what got us into space in the first place, the desire to land an H-bomb anywhere on earth we wanted in minutes.

[WinkyDink]

11. "local air"?

[comtec]

12. yes H2O

1/3 of that equation is oxygen.
you can break the Oxygen fro the hydrogen, use the hydrogen for fuel, the O2 for replenishment of air in the system.

Of course a lunar base would have a garden to help with air scrubbing as well as food. but the point being you can make air from water.

The most important part of a permanent base is the availability of fresh water/air. The moon has that in abundance it would seem.

[Motown_Johnny]

13. air is more than oxygen

It is possible to do as you say but you still need to remove the carbon dioxide or it will simply continue to build up.

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Meteorology/Makeup_of_the_Atmosphere

^snip^

Gas Percent Composition

Nitrogen (N2) 78 .080
Oxygen (O2) 20 .946
Argon (Ar) 0 .934
Carbon Dioxide (CO2) 0 .038
Neon (Ne) 0 .00182
Helium (He) 0 .000524
Methane (CH4) 0 .00015
Hydrogen (H2) 0 .00005

[comtec]

14. you might want to work on your reading skills, I said in addition to

just like a submarine can't recycle the same air indefinitely, you can't do the same on a station.
you need at least two things, and arboretum, where plants can naturally and more effectively process CO2 and by adding additional 02 into the air mix.

I'm also aware that there is more nitrogen than 02 in the air, but our bodies process the 02 most.

Point being, is what we need, water, sun, air, are all present on the moon to sustain a base.

[Aerows]

5. I'm all for the truth getting exposed

I just don't see your angle here. Sometimes, it does take a while studying something to come to a conclusion. I wish it was instantaneous to solve all the world's problems, but scientists are anymore perfect than a social worker.

Medical workers don't automatically make the sun rise in whatever country you live in, despite the fact that sometimes, they do perform miracles.

[JVS]

6. The moon bombing was such a smart move.

[Motown_Johnny]

7. I always had a problem with the assumption posted in the article

and which is described here as now creating a mystery.


^snip^


Scientists have long held that the moon formed when a giant object from outer space smashed into the Earth as it was forming 3.7 billion years ago and blasted out huge quantities of rocks that aggregated to form the moon. But the heat of that impact must surely have destroyed whatever water might have existed in the early moon, and therein lies a mystery, Pendleton said.




I thought it reasonable to assume that the same process which brought water to the Earth after the impact which formed the Moon would have also brought water to the Moon (comet impacts).



I was not surprised that water ice was found in areas on the Moon which do not receive sunlight. I will be surprised if any reasonable quantity is in the crust itself. Maybe the ~40 year old samples were exposed to our atmosphere at some point and simply absorbed some moisture at that point.


Skeptical of these findings right now. If more samples are tested and confirm the result I will then buy in.

[Kablooie]

9. So it's going to look like this...

[WinkyDink]

10. Russian oligarchs are readying their escapes as we speak.