WATER FROM WIND: In this diagram, which models one possible explanation for water molecules that have been detected at low density across the lunar surface, hydrogen ions in the solar wind bombard the moon's sunward side and react with oxygen-bearing compounds to form water. At lunar noon, when the temperature reaches its peak, sunlight can break water molecules apart, but in cooler hours the solar wind contributes to their re-formation.
Image: Image courtesy of University of Maryland/F. Merlin/McREL
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A hotly anticipated experiment will test the theory next month that the moon's permanently shadowed polar craters harbor pockets of water ice. A NASA spacecraft called the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) will perform a two-stage bombardment of a south polar crater to see what rises up in the ensuing debris plume.
Now, just two weeks before LCROSS's scheduled barrage, comes a suite of evidence that the moon indeed hosts water. But the new studies point to a different sort of deposit than the concentrated ice supply LCROSS seeks—they indicate that water exists diffusely across the moon as molecules clinging to the surface in low concentrations. What is more, there may be a water cycle in which the molecule is broken down and reformulated over the span of a lunar daytime (about two Earth weeks long).
A trio of papers published online this week in Science, each using spectroscopic data collected by a different spacecraft, find light absorptions characteristic of water or hydroxyl (OH) molecules or both. And the papers' authors say that the scenario in which both molecules appear across the lunar surface is the most plausible explanation for their data.
Water and hydroxyl are related molecular species and have similar spectroscopic signatures—the wavelengths characteristic of each reside nearby in the infrared portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. The three-micron absorption band indicative of water appeared broadly across the lunar surface in spectrometric data taken by the Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3), an instrument that circled the moon aboard India's Chandrayaan 1 spacecraft until the orbiter's mission ended prematurely last month.
At first, the instrument's minders were confounded, figuring that something on M3 had gone awry. "The first reaction that I think all of us had was, this is ridiculous," says Carle Pieters, a planetary scientist at Brown University and principal investigator for M3. The team was finding evidence for water not in permanently shadowed craters but on the sunlit portions of the moon, which just did not add up.
"We spent months going through our data, trying to find what went wrong," she recalls. "What is it that gives us this signature that we can't get rid of?" Unable to troubleshoot the odd result, Pieters's group turned to a second, and then a third, independent observation.
Roger Clark, a U.S. Geological Survey spectroscopist on the M3 team, reanalyzed archival data from the Cassini spacecraft, now exploring Saturn and its satellites, taken during a 1999 flyby of the moon. The Cassini data agreed with the finding that water appears to be widespread across the lunar surface.
Yet more confirmation came from a timely flyby of the Deep Impact probe, en route to a cometary rendezvous in 2010. In June the spacecraft swung past the moon, and its spectrometer put the lunar water theory to the test—a test that went swimmingly well.
"In the Deep Impact data, we have very strong evidence that [water is] everywhere," says planetary geologist Jessica Sunshine, a senior research scientist at the University of Maryland, College Park, who works on both the M3 instrument and the Deep Impact mission. "There is no place on the moon that we don't see this." She notes that the water appears to hug the lunar surface—reaching depths measured in millimeters or even hundreds of microns—and that the local abundance in a typical area appears quite low. "We're still talking about amounts of water that are less than the hottest desert you could think of here," Sunshine says.
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14 Comments
Add CommentVery cool. Will it be possible to construct moisture traps on the surface that will capture the water that is generated as the protons in the solar wind combine with Oxygen in the rock of the Lunar surface? Perhaps a cup a year per acre?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSo it's muggy on the Moon during the daytime and frosty at night.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIs there also a case for nominative determination here. Jessica Sunshine, Planetary Geologist.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisInteresting stuff. On a practical level however, not very useful.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt's a lot more practical than people recommending churning up millions of tons of regolith to grab Helium 3.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBut, of course, even if we don't find water on the moon, that doesn't mean you need to ship it up there with you. Just take some hydrogen and make your own using the oxygen in the lunar regolith.
" "If you had a cubic metre of lunar soil, you could squeeze it and get out a litre of water," explained US moon researcher Larry Taylor."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis statement is in the site BBC NEWS (section: Science & Environment); title: Spacecraft see 'damp' Moon soils; date: 24 September 2009.
Page: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8272144.stm
It may be there, but extracting it with any kind of reasonable process is quite another thing entirely.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisO.K. Water. So, Nestle's will want to put a bottling plant there, now. Fine.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisLet's say Nestle's pays for the development of the heavy lift vehicles needed to bring semi-truck loads of bottles back here for sale.
Moon Drops -- Lunar Liquid
Phoenix is SAVED.
Some of the rock is also quite rich in Titanium. If we suppose for a minute that we can position a suitable processing plant so as to process Titanium, Helium 3, and water simultaneously, we should be in business for using the moon as a kick-off point for manned exploration of the entire rest of the solar system.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPerhaps the first step I would do is build a breeder reactor on the moon, probably the next crater over from the processing plant. The breeder reactor obviates the need for covering such a large area of the moon's surface with solar energy collectors that it would be visible from Earth (plus such collectors take a lot of material to build and they aren't always facing the sun optimally.)
With a breeder reactor you start off with a fixed amount of Uranium shipped up from Earth and that's it. From then on your local economy runs on Plutonium, including the huge live-in centrifuge you will build with the circumference of its arc just below the crater rim so that lunar colonists can spend at least part of their day under simulated full Earth gravity.
When a nuclear plant reaches the end of its useful life on the moon, no further disposal is necessary. In fact, extremely expensive redundant safety systems are not necessary either, because such plants are intrinsically safe when operated responsibly and further any conceivable accident can't harm Earth at all (nor even harm the colonists in the next crater over, except financially.)
Some people might object to lunar colonists accumulating Plutonium, from which they could fabricate nuclear bombs with which to blackmail Earth into sending up more supplies to the moon base. Actually, the first people to colonize outer space don't need nuclear bombs to do that. All they would have to do is take a shuttle out to the asteroid belt, select a suitable-size rock, then perturb its orbit just enough that in a few years the rock comes blazing through the Earth's atmosphere and smashes into London or Tokyo with a power many, many times larger than the largest of nuclear bombs.
There are a lot of reasons why humans should colonize the inner solar system and a lot of implications as to what such colonization will mean for man. For one thing, our world views will have to become our universe views. Colonizing the moon is the necessary first step.
Why so much money is wated on reaserch like this...invest this money to save our planet earth :-)))))
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhy so much money is wasted on research like this..Are we going to use this water...o.invest this money to save our planet earth :-)))))
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHey Kapil, save your prescious planet Earth from what? It certainly isn't getting too hot from the burning of fossil fuels--that claim will be overwhelmingly debunked in the next decade using the evidence of the last decade. Nor is any other particular category of pollution all the severe, except in the minds of those who over-blow everything and are afraid of everything.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisUnreasonable fear of absolutely everything really is a loathsome human characteristic. Our prescious planet really is not a fragile planet, after all, nor a particularly delicate planet. It is a hardy and robust planet which routinely has received blows from nature itself far, far more poisonous, more acidic, and more severe in every parameter, than man can even think or has ever managed to render ourselves.
If you have some type of personal grudge against humanity and wish to accuse us unfairly of destroying the planet, go right ahead, but you only convict yourself of having a tiny mind driven by fantastic prejudices.
Humanity has not ruined this planet, We have barely affected it at all, and certainly nothing whatsoever on the scale of the natural calamities and destabilizations that routinely come along in the history of Earth whether or not man is doing any puny little thing, such as our miniscule perturberance of the trace gas carbon dioxide.
I think Michael Cook is writing a story could named as How to colonize the Moon! It is a big and ridiculous story really! Just viewing the way we utilize resources on the earth and the style we survive in the world, it is the vivid answer to those questions that why we have to face so many problems nowadays, such species extinction, the growing sea level and the serious climate change issue and ensuing the question that how long can we live on the earth and whether the earth will go to its end without any living creatures! Suppose that some years ahead, we master the ability to survive on the moon, how it could be if we treat the moon just as the way we have done and are doing to our once green planet! A pitiful story, and it is a pity that it is really existing in our surrondings!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI think Michael Cook is writing a story could named as How to colonize the Moon! It is a big and ridiculous story really! Just viewing the way we utilize resources on the earth and the style we survive in the world, it is the vivid answer to those questions that why we have to face so many problems nowadays, such species extinction, the growing sea level and the serious climate change issue and ensuing the question that how long can we live on the earth and whether the earth will go to its end without any living creatures! Suppose that some years ahead, we master the ability to survive on the moon, how it could be if we treat the moon just as the way we have done and are doing to our once green planet! A pitiful story, and it is a pity that it is really existing in our surrondings!
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