Paul Lucey, a planetary scientist at the University of Hawaii at Manoa who wrote a commentary in Science to accompany the three spectroscopic studies, says that he found the results "pretty stunning."
"I was on vacation when I read the first paper, and I used colorful language when I read it," Lucey says. "I was amazed." At the same time, he says, it is not certain that the spectra show both water and hydroxyl. "We see OH or H2O," he says. "I believe further analysis of the data that now exists will probably allow distinguishing between those two cases."
On the other hand, Lucey notes, the Deep Impact study "is suggesting that the signature is changing with temperature or time, so that suggests to me that water is more likely, just because OH binds so tightly to minerals and is not going to be very mobile." In some places, such as near the equator, where daytime temperatures are high, Deep Impact saw the signal dissipating by the time the sun was directly overhead, returning when cooler temperatures arrived in the lunar evening.
One explanation for that phenomenon is that a stream of charged hydrogen atoms in the solar wind could react with oxygen-bearing lunar minerals to produce water at the surface. That process would explain the steady, fast-acting replenishment seen in the data after sunlight has dissociated the water molecules.
Sunshine notes that in her view it is not so much a question of whether hydroxyl or water is present but how much each contributes to the spectral signature. "The water and hydroxyl sort of mix, and it's more complicated to know what is uniquely water versus uniquely OH," she says. "However, we are seeing changes as this water loss happens, and we see changes in the different parts of the absorption feature, so we're seeing different species coming in and out. The simplest explanation for that is certainly that you have water being lost. OH is a much stronger bond; it's harder to get rid of."
Pieters says the data from the three papers, taken together, settle the water question. "Basically, the bottom line, if you read all three of them, is there is no question that water and hydroxyl exist on the surficial upper layers of the moon," she says.
So why has this widespread surface phenomenon never been uncovered before, especially given that its discovery relies in part on 10-year-old data? "I think it's just one of those funny science sociological phenomena that it just didn't occur to take the measurement," Lucey says.
Sunshine says that the focus on polar traps, such as that sought by LCROSS, tended to dominate the search for water on the lunar surface. "Everybody tends to think about this in terms of polar ice caps and skating rinks and lakes, and we're talking about molecules," she says. "It's a real shift in the way people think about water on the moon."
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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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