Yet Another Source Of Water on the Moon
More Evidence of Water on the Moon
“NASA-funded lunar research has yielded evidence of water locked in mineral grains on the surface of the moon from an unknown source deep beneath the surface. Using data from NASA’s Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3) instrument aboard the Indian Space Research Organization’s Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft, scientists remotely detected magmatic water, or water that originates from deep within the moon’s interior, on the surface of the moon.”
The Importance of Lunar Water, Dennis Wingo, SpaceRef
“The argument of the Mars advocates are all based upon the results of missions to the red planet over the past few decades, this lunar advocate just wonders how much more we would have learned about the Moon if a similar number of missions had flown there. Mars is a destination of romance, the moon of utility. At the end of the day, utility will triumph as without the utility of the riches in resources that the Moon brings, there will be no romance on Mars.”
– New research shows water present across the moon’s surface – It turns out the moon is a lot wetter than we ever thought, earlier post
– Water on the Moon: It’s Been There All Along, earlier post
– Water on the Moon and Earth Came From The Same Primitive Meteorites, earlier post
I have read that the some of the Apollo lunar samples had high water content. They were considered outliers that were contaminated by Earthly water. These findings have started to be reevaluated in light of the new remote sensing data.
Just goes to show how preconceived notions can influence scientific findings. How would things be different today if that water had been recognized 40 years ago during Apollo or even if we had been allowed to fly the Lunar Resource Mapper mission 20 years ago?
What is the amount of water in parts per billion?
This makes a difference to whether it is worth while to mine.
Look at some of the old Apollo reports. It was in the tens to hundreds of parts per million….
The Apollo samples were basically uneconomic. I was hoping the new sources had higher quantities.
Andrew, read what I said. The Apollo samples were “uneconomic” because the samples with high water content were rejected as outliers.
Spudis points out that in the polar regions just the normal regolith has hundreds of times higher water and other volatiles.
We have know about water at the poles for a couple of years. However Bullialdus crater is near the lunar equator.
Ok so there’s water on the moon. But how can it be economically extracted? You can’t simply drill a well and pump it out. Large amounts of regolith or other water containing rock would have to be ground up and processed in a pressurized environment. Other constituants would have to be extracted for this to be cost-effective. Maybe a solar furnace with a fractionating column could do all of this.
Sounds like a job for oil refinery personnel. Armageddon 2.
Maybe take advantage of Ames’ Small Spacecraft Technology Program and similar non-Mercedes class programs that are cheaper and not as vunerable to multi-year budget issues. However, the spacecraft must focus on just a few science objectives. i.e. LADEE and a few other lunar missions.
Dennis writes, “Mars is a destination of romance, the moon of utility.” This reminded me of this from Rocketpunk and MacGuffinite,
http://www.projectrho.com/r…
“The Gobi Desert is about a thousand times as hospitable as Mars and five hundred times cheaper and easier to reach. Nobody ever writes “Gobi Desert Opera” because, well, it’s just kind of plonkingly obvious that there’s no good reason to go there and live. It’s ugly, it’s inhospitable and there’s no way to make it pay. Mars is just the same, really. We just romanticize it because it’s so hard to reach.”
[some people debate this as there are few settlers in Gobi desert.]
Wow, evidence of serpentinization of olivine! Very cool. Evidence of liquid water within the Moon IOW. This is great: getting water on the Moon might be as simple as drilling a well. Of course one shouldn’t expect to be able to drill water at any random location, but it seems likely to me that there might be localized regions where relatively shallow wells would work. One wants a spot with extra thick regolith atop of a zone of higher than normal heat flow: the Ina “D caldera”, for example: it’s perched on top of a volcanic shield mound with a regolith depth of 12 to 30 meters (average depth < 10 m). (Also it’s at a nice low-latitude near-side location!) Calculations show that liquid water could be stable at the base of the regolith there. Further calculations show that a gas-driven, limnic-style eruption driven by liquid water supersaturated with CO2 would have enough energy to cause the observed excavations. The missing piece of the puzzle, though, was that there should be evidence of serpentinization in excavated surface minerals. This latest finding provides that evidence. Will be presenting the theory at the Workshop on Golden Spike Human Lunar Expeditions in Houston in October.
http://www.hou.usra.edu/mee…