LCROSS: Yes, We Found Water - A Significant Amount

After listening to the similarity of what was found on the moon, and comets, could it be that the moon, is a 'captured' comet from billions of years ago? vs. a chuck of Earth blasted off as the result of large impact during Earths' early days?

And will Ed Weiler create more missions to the moon?

Fantastic news! They said they detected 100kg of water in the narrow field of view of the plume that the spacecraft had. I wonder what that means for the water concentration given a 20-30 metre crater. Some of the instruments had a 1 degree field of view, another had 18 degrees etc. (see http://lcross.arc.nasa.gov/docs/LCROSS_Payload_Summary.doc)

I think they also said towards the end of the Q&A that they think the impact site is wetter than the driest desert on Earth (in Chile). I wonder how much water per ton of soil is in that desert (I got nowhere trying to google the answer)?

I know they're still working on this and other questions but it's fun to try to guesstimate!

This is awesome and such a counterpoint to Bolden doing yet another space architecture study.

That would be three now since Columbia. The CAIB set two meta-requirements - fit requirements to budget and proceed in a fashion that would insure continuity across administration. I hope Bolden reads the CAIB and ponders history and considers his advice carefully to help precent the ongoing programmatic ossilations which are FAR more deadly then those in a launch vehicle.

And I do so wish that Stu had been honest and able to take bathe in the community's praise at this juncture for his role in establishing the liklihood of lunar ice. Now he will truly live in infamy, facing scorn and shame from his former community. I hope the pride he can rightly still take from this will help him find new purpose in prison and not take his own life.

Last, I hope that Robert Heinlein is looking down, up, or sideways at us from some impossible tangle of universes and chuckling at his vision of an ice based Lunar economy, as his ash drifts on the orbit of his Shuttle launch to the stars.

I stand corrected! (Hat/Humble pie nom nom nom :)
Looking forward to the papers and a sudden rush to get rovers and whatnot to the poles. With a bit of luck the 2020's will be like the 1910's all over again!

"For scientific leadership, give me Scott; for swift and efficient travel, Amundsen; but if you are in a hopeless position, when there seems no way out, get down on your knees and pray for Shackleton."

Congratulations to the team for providing the proof. And a paradigm shift in the way we look at the Moon!

Speaking of Heinlein:

The first thing to do is determine how much.

The second thing to do is to find out how fast it's replaced after extraction.

Sure the first estimate of the number of years until depletion will be some handwaved "don't worry" googleplex...

... and then the exponential function sets in...

...

But Wargo was right: Yearly precipitation measurements on the Moon?! :)

I have been reading Heinlein for 50 years and have only known Wargo for 10 but their batting averages are both .. well .. astronomical.

It looks like they also found hydrocarbons too. And that means a native source of carbon to grow plants. This is a major discovery that should enable humans to live on the Moon without the need to import oxygen, water, or carbon dioxide from Earth.

This is one giant leap for humankind!

Marcel F. Williams

How ironic that evidence for water mounts, making the moon a much more attractive object of study, just as we pick a 'kick the can down the road' path for human space flight that will bypass human moon landings for decades.

I was starting to get really pessimistic about the results, so I think this news is fantastic. Mega-congratulations to the LCROSS team on their sucessful and historic mission. This should open the door to further missions to explore the lunar water deposits. No matter what happens with HSF, at least there should be justifcation for an unmanned research program.

Approximately how much water have they found? To repeatedly make rocket fuel sufficient water to fill a reservoir is needed. if it is tiny like say 24 gallons then the moon dwellers will be living a desert lifestyle out of 'Dune'.

This is the most amazing thing I've heard in so long, and I've just known for years that there is ice hiding down there. Now to hear about possible hydrocarbon deposits? Seriously? With the Augustine report just in and now Administrator Bolden calling for yet another brainstorming session, now is the time for our president and leader Mr. Obama to recognize the 40th anniversary of Apollo 12 and announce a mission to return to the moon again, to stay this time. We should go straight Cabeus, in the spirit of that landing.

Actually this is exactly why Constellation was on the wrong track from the start. Constellation was going to do the Apollo method, assuming there were no game changers. They were going to carry everything needed from home.

IF the water is harvestable, and that is still a big IF, then the Apollo/Constellation method for long term lunar exploitation makes no sense at all.

The next step are automated probes looking for water, testing techniques for harvesting water, and distillation of water for fuel, oxygen and life support.

This is astounding news but it is possible to get too optimistic for what this probably means.

@ ZSpace,

The most likely explanation for the similarity between lunar and cometary H20 is that the lunar deposits are of cometary origin - cometary material that impacted in the craters in the distant past and have remained frozen and stable without direct exposure to sunlight. Geochemical studies have proven that the Moon as a whole is a silicate body like Earth, not an icy body like the comets and outer solar system moons.

@ zapkitty,

If the cometary origin theory is correct then the answer to your question "how quickly is it replaced?" is "never". We thus perceive that water on the moon is a very finite resource. It can certainly be used for life support and cooling functions but it would need to be strictly recycled. Using it for propellent ISRU is completely out-of-the-question as removing it from the Moon would mean it is never replaced.

Editor's note: "Never"? I don't understand how you can possibly say that. The Moon is struck by things on a constant basis - as are other bodies in the solar system. Please tell me ho w you know that the Moon will "never" be struck by a comet ever again.

IMHO, lunar soil hydroxyls are a far more intersting potential resource as they are potentially self-renewing. A satellite needs to be placed, ideally at one of the liberation points, to keep the same points on the surface under continuing watch to determing how quickly the hydroxyls form, where and in what concentration. If a little luck goes our way, the entire lunar surface could be essentially a very low-speed but completely self-sustaining water-generating chemical factory. Lunar surface hydroxyls could be the basis of lunar propellent ISRU whilst cometary water is not.

We thus perceive that water on the moon is a very finite resource.... Using it for propellent ISRU is completely out-of-the-question as removing it from the Moon would mean it is never replaced.

Even if I accept your premise, why is it "out of the question" to use polar water for propellant? The universe is full of "finite resources" -- do you propose ex cathedra to declare them all off limits to all humanity forever?

Our estimate of the quantity of lunar polar ice back in the 1990's (after Clementine and Lunar Prospector) is that there are between 200 million and several billion metric tonnes of water ice at each pole. Just for perspective, such quantities could allow you to launch the equivalent of one Space Shuttle every day for over 2000 years.

Lunar polar water is an easily accessible and usable resource that will allow us to get a foothold on the Moon. Once there, we can build up an infrastructure that allows us to access lower grade deposits and ultimately, extra-lunar resources, such as asteroids. It is an enabling resource, not the ultimate one.

The point that I'm making is that the polar water is a 'use once and once only' resource. We have to take a long-term perspective here. If we want permanent lunar habitation, we cannot simply use the very few resources of an extremely resource-poor world (especially in terms of life-support) without any consideration of future requirements.

We don't know how much water is on the Moon, but finite resources need careful management. That means, don't throw away hundreds of tons in a short-sighted and unsustainable attempt to reduce the cost of deep-space flight. We don't know when or even if the next 'refill' with drop out of the sky, so we cannot factor any refills into a reasonable or sane plan. We have to assume what is there is all we are going to get. Anything else on top of that is a lucky bonus and may not even be usable.

A conservative strategy now means greater sustainability into the future. "Use it all now, God will provide" is a folly that will lead to the whole effort crashing and burning very, very quickly.

(note: "daily" and "daylight" refer to the lunar cycles)

Uh... Ben?

The solar proton bombardment that is theorized to cause the formation of hydroxyl molecules and subsequently water molecules all across the lunar surface during daylight also kicks up the resultant molecules and causes them to migrate on a daily basis.

So what happens to the hydroxyl and the water when they stray into the same cold traps that hold cometary ice?

"It's snowing on the Moon!"

Thus the water taken from the cold traps would be replenished by additional water each day... but at what rate?

Thus I proposed annual measurements... and so we need to go and measure the precipitation on the moon.

Gives me such a kick to write that! :D

I wonder if the water cold-trapped over time from the proton bombardment would be greater than that retained from cometary impacts?

And how would both compare to the water leftover from the Moon's formation?

Wheee!

pspudis said:

"200 million and several billion metric tonnes of water ice at each pole"

Take it from an expert: You'll want to be careful doing that... 'cause if you wave your paws much harder you'll wind up flying around the room.

I've bonked my head on the ceiling more than a few times doing that :)

I'm not trying to make light of your previous work but at this point we don't know how fast the water is replenished.

We also don't know how much the extraction process and any associated facilities will interfere with the rehydration of the existing cold traps.

We don't know and we need to find out.

It's okay to think about what we could do if the most favorable estimates turn out to be true... it's not okay to make critical plans, long-range plans, as if the most favorable estimates were established facts. cf: NASA et al

Fun thought... an idea I've proposed previously: Would we be better off building our own easily-accessible cold traps ala the windtraps in Frank Herbert's "Dune"...? :)

Editor's note: Hey "Zapkitty" Paul is an expert in this field. Are you? I'll take Paul's comments any day.

Anybody want to guess what the next mission is going to be to the moon and its new found water? And when that might happen?

SMD will only fund missions that pass science competition reviews. ESMD would have more flexibility to mount something near term.

Any guesses as to what makes sense next?

Editor's note: "Hey "Zapkitty" Paul is an expert in this field. Are you? I'll take Paul's comments any day."

Me? Just assume I'm a rank dilettante with a disturbing habit of being right about the wrong things :)

But... We don't know what we don't know. And we don't know what we will do. And we don't know what the effects of what we will do will be on the things we don't know about.

And there's the exponential effect... and it will definitely come into play if we go to the moon and stay.

While I can understand what pspudis is getting at in not letting some sort of fearful neo-hippie ecological stasis paralyze us into not using available resources...

... neither is it advisable to count on such resources for long-range human planning until they are actually tallied and a reliable estimate of their extents and rates of replenishment, if any, can be made.

And as of right now we can't do that until we go and find out.

There is a mechanism for both the emplacement of the water and its replenishment. It is the solar wind. You need to read ALL of the recent findings reported on the subject. The solar wind has high speed hydrogen atoms/ions that hit the lunar surface at @ 250 km/sec. Some of these hydrogen atoms/ions dislodge an oxygen atom from a lunar oxide (which looks to be Fe-oxides at this point). This creates a hydroxl or sometimes when two oxygen atoms are dislodged it makes a water molecule.

Using Jim Arnolds statistical physics regarding the random walk of water molecules toward a cold trap, you can estimate the emplacement rate of water from this source on the Moon.

If I might make a plea for pure Science here... before we use all of the lunar water reserves for shuttle launches, life support or the High Diving pool in the lunar olympics stadium by the somewhat excellent Pat Rawlings.
http://www.outofthecradle.net/WordPress/wp-content/uploads/lunar-olympics.jpg

One of the points made at the presser(1) yesterday was that these deposits are a record of our solar system from the Late Heavy Bombardment 4.1 Gyears BCE to whenever we get there! As such their value in-situ may be scientifically more important than say a really hot cup of tea! It is vital that the deepest and most scientifically interesting be preserved so that future generations and future techniques can further expand our understanding of Life, the Universe and Everything.

Next up the LEAG meeting 17th November and American Geophysical Union, on December 14-18.
(via Emily Lakdawalla)

Personally I am now more excited about the potential for genuine Moonshine. (Cometary sourced Ethanol.) I bet that would be worth a few Megabucks per bottle Hic!(transit gloria mundi :)

Bootnote (1)
http://www.space-multimedia.nl.eu.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=5487%3Alcross-science-news-briefing-november-13-&catid=1%3Alatest&Itemid=1

The quantity of water on the moon is very important; if there is only a tiny amount then using hydrogen rocket motors on lunar landers is simply a very expensive way for NASA to shoot itself in the foot. The Moon base will quickly run out of water and have to be abandoned.

A simple alternative is to plan to import all the water needed and reduce running costs by using a fuel that is widely available on the Moon.

Possible ISRU lunar rocket propellants include Al+LOX and Mg+LOX. These can be burnt in LOX rich hybrid engines that produce thrust by boiling LOX.

The rocket motor engineers will have to develop hi-tech hybrid engines or cryogenic mono-thrusters that can burn metals. The geologists will have to prospect for the metal ores and the chemists produce ISRU processes able to extract the fuel on the Moon. All this work will cost a lot of money.

Consequently, obtaining a valid answer to the question, "Are there millions of gallons of easily extractable water on the Moon?" is very important. Get the answer wrong and it will kill the Moon dream.

I have a question.. Isn't that water irradiated from years of exposure to space and said solar wind? One more question. How could those craters be permanently shaded for millions of years if the moon has been slowing moving away from earth that entire time causing the angle of the sun to change over that time period? Ok ,one more question..If it is So easy to make rocket fuel from water why is fuel so expensive for the space shuttle? Some might thinks these questions are stupid but you never know if you don't ask.

Fred,

Yes, any exposed water ice would be irradiated, but most of it appears to be buried beneath a protective layer of dry regolith. Perhaps it was originally laid down as dirty ice and the upper layer sublimed away, leaving behind a lag deposit of dust. Once covered by regolith, polar ice is effectively impervious to sublimation. In the 30 K cold traps near the poles, it's there permanently.

As for the cold traps, dynamical studies estimate that the lunar spin axis has been in its current configuration for at least the last 2 billion years. Before that, we simply don't know. This suggests that the polar ice deposits could have been accumulating for the last 2 billion years, a significant fraction of the age of the Moon (4.5 billion years).

I think the fuel price includes lots of shipping and handling. ISRU ought to be entirely robotic. But the space shuttle fuel has human beings, complete with workmen's comp, within 500 feet of it for much of its lifecycle. Here's an analogy: Have you ever pulled up to a full-service gas pump and paid a robot to fill up your tank? We don't lack the technology in 2009. So, how much would such a robot cost? Add in the cost to demonstrate that the robot is perfectly safe, then the cost to lobby Congress to make the process legal. You have to pump a lot of gas before the delivery system is paid off.

additional info: The inclination of lunar orbit is 5.1 degrees. The sun is 389 times further from the the Earth than the moon. Three to four billion years ago the Moon's orbit was half its present radius. Max elevation from the ecliptic would have been .00654 degrees, versus .0130 degrees today.

Regarding replenishment of lunar water, can anyone provide the latest insight into the controversy regarding the influx of icy comets? Louis A. Frank had estimated rather large numbers of such comets intersecting with Earth (1 million/year 20-40 ton icy comets!). Other scientists say the satellite data was just noise.

.00654 degrees, versus .0130 degrees seems significant ,I'm gonna run some computer models with your information and watch the poles.. ty

additional info: The inclination of lunar orbit is 5.1 degrees. The sun is 389 times further from the the Earth than the moon. Three to four billion years ago the Moon's orbit was half its present radius. Max elevation from the ecliptic would have been .00654 degrees, versus .0130 degrees today.

Several different things are confused here. The inclination of the Moon's orbit is not relevant to the presence of polar cold traps -- only the orientation of the Moon's spin axis in relation to the ecliptic plane is relevant. That determines which craters have dark interiors and to what extent. The current orientation of the spin axis is 1.5 degree inclination (i.e., 1.5 degrees from a normal to the ecliptic); this creates several thousand square kilometers of permanent darkness, most of which (we now know) are colder than the surface of Pluto. This spin axis configuration has been the same for at least the most recent 2 billion years (W. R. Ward, 1975, Past Orientation of the lunar spin axis. Science v. 189, n. 4200, p. 377-379.) Thus, the Moon has accumulated water for at least that period of time. It also suggests that water ice should be concentrated in only the upper few meters of the surface.

The difficulty I have with my computer models is knowing the exact depth of some of these craters from rim to crater floor. I will say the having ecliptic plane does square away a lot of the problems I was having with getting the angles right.I looked at the topography data from several probes but they aren't consistent with each other. I have thought about averaging all the depths but that will take a lot of time for all the craters in question. Has anyone thought of lava tubes or lunar caves as a great cool place to find that kinda thing? I think that would also be ideal for a radiation protection as far as a habitat. I see all the plans for a lunar base involving these exposed habitat modules , which I don't understand.Although , Lunar regolith is always heralded as this all purpose radiation barrier. But would that very same lunar regolith be irradiated from exposure to the sun for millions of years along with the water ice that lies beneath.I mean cant soil be radioactive?Ask any scientist that has taken samples of water and soil from Chernobyl in the last 20 year they will tell you yes! yes it can.its the little things.. I know now someone is gonna hit me with the radioactivity of the regolith returned from the Apollo missions RAD count..BTW I will be watching Methuselah launch today.. Its site to behold .. I never seen a Saturn 5 launch . But I have witnessed all but 7 shuttle launches from either KSC or my backyard it never gets any less spectacular. I will miss the ole girl. When your there at Kennedy you can feel it in your chest and get the sense its the closest you will ever get to an explosion that big without dying.

"The difficulty I have with my computer models is knowing the exact depth of some of these craters from rim to crater floor.....I looked at the topography data from several probes but they aren't consistent with each other."

Which craters? Kaguya and LRO data are pretty consistent.

well those two are but do I just throw out clementine and smart 1 out with the trash? I guess I do.. I ran the models with LRO topography in the moons current orbit there was a permanent shadow in several craters(south pole) from about 1.8 million years ago.Looking back before the 2 million someone had suggested I noticed in my simulations some craters on the north pole have been in shadows even longer than those on the south pole.Would that mean a better chance for ice?