
It's Official: Water Found on the Moon - mgcreed
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/090923-moon-water-discovery.html
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Legion
I guess now Celine Dion can make whomever she's singing to love her.

On a less silly note, there's so many of these "found water on X" stories that
as a lay person, it's hard to tell what's an exciting discovery. I mean, it
took a quick Google search to find a "water found on moon!" article dating
back to 1998: <http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/3299>

What's different between the lunar water ice in the 1998 article and the
finding of lunar water ice now?

~~~
InclinedPlane
Previously there has been evidence of Hydrogen at certain locations on the
Moon, though the evidence did not rule out the possibility that it was bound
up in rocks as hydrate minerals. Concrete is perhaps the most widely known
hydrate, few would regard concrete as a ready source of H2O even though it may
be as much as 1/4 water by weight. Other evidence has pointed to actual water
ice but not conclusively. This recent paper puts forward unambiguous evidence
that there is actual water ice on the surface of the Moon.

That's significant because water ice is an extremely useful resource in
colonization of the Solar System. It can be harvested for potable water, of
course, but it can also be cracked into Oxygen and Hydrogen, for breathing and
use as a rocket fuel.

That last is extremely important because of the rocket equation. The amount of
propellant (fueled mass / empty mass) you need to accelerate a rocket to a
specific velocity (delta V) scales exponentially with the ratio of that
velocity to the rocket's exhaust velocity. Staging lets you stretch this harsh
restriction by throwing away parts of your vehicle so that you can clean the
slate and get to a better mass ratio for the next stage. But staging is still
exponentially costly, just more efficiently so.

Now, if you look at the very end point of a trip to the Moon and back you have
a vehicle launching from the lunar surface and then (the same or another
vehicle) transferring to a return trajectory to Earth. These maneuvers take a
sizable amount of propellant (especially launching from the surface). The
weight of that propellant needs to be gently landed on the surface of the
Moon, which costs extra propellant. Further, the return propellant plus its
corresponding proportion of the landing propellant needs to be boosted from
Earth orbit to the Moon, which costs further propellant. Etc, etc, all the way
down to the launch vehicle(s) on Earth. As you see, the return propellant
imposes an escalating parasitic cost throughout the whole trip. If, instead of
the above, you were able to pilot a mostly empty vehicle to the Moon's surface
where it would fuel up with Liquid Oxygen and Liquid Hydrogen manufactured by
mining and processing lunar water ice then you would be able to cut out that
whole huge chunk of extra weight and propellant needed to get to the Moon and
back.

Which means, you could travel to the Moon and back with much lower Earth bound
mission mass, which means you can use smaller launch vehicles, which means you
can get to the Moon cheaper and easier.

Not to mention, of course, that supplies of water make maintaining a mostly
self-sufficient lunar base much, much easier.

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Aron
I would think it cheaper to send 32 ounces of water from Earth to the moon in
a Dasani bottle, than to dig it out of a ton of rock. Maybe we can make a
really long straw and just suck it up from the oceans directly.

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zandorg
32 ounces per ton? Imagine this huge solar-powered factory covering a mile,
with a little trickle of water from the 'out' stage.

~~~
jerf
Yeah, but the factory probably isn't doing it just for the water. It's primary
purpose will probably be He3 extraction, with water as an incidental-but-very-
important sideline. Perhaps other valuable things too.

~~~
zandorg
Answered:

[http://feeds.space.com/~r/spaceheadlines/~3/3n9zA4b63i0/0909...](http://feeds.space.com/~r/spaceheadlines/~3/3n9zA4b63i0/090924-moon-
oxygen.html)

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berntb
Hmm... a volume in shadow, shielded from sunlight, should have low
temperatures and be a water trap? Water molecules generated by solar wind or
from comets should bounce around until they got there.

I predict that we will soon see designs for trapping (and harvesting) "dew".

This is like Herbert's "Dune", will they find spices, too? :-)

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Dellort
Great. Now we can have bottled water from the moon. Of course we will just tap
it here, but nobody will know!

~~~
jhancock
moonwater.com and moonjuice.com already taken.

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onreact-com
I don't get it. Is there really water like we know it from earth or is it just
inside some rocks? This article doesn't tell us.

~~~
berntb
The article said there were molecules on the surface. (Either from meteors or
hydrogen from the solar wind making hydroxyl (check wikipedia) and/or water
with oxygen from rocks.) Quite a lot more than ever expected.

This is good, a moon colony might even be self sufficient in water.

(You have to wonder what other weird, really reactive radicals are on the
surface from the solar wind? It will be fun to check for erosion on the
equipment left by the moon landings. Any real chemists around? :-) This might
be a future problem.)

Edit: The information asked for is in the article, btw. After the heading
"Where the water comes from". :-)

Edit: A bit of syntax.

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dw0rm
> When Apollo astronauts returned from the moon 40 years ago, they brought
> back several samples of lunar rocks.

The Apollo Moon landing was fake.

~~~
mahmud
Yeah, according to Nostradamus, the Knights Templar and the Free Masons have
joined forces with ancient Mayan spirits to put a telekinetic shield around
the moon. Now if you spell all the nouns in the previous sentence backwards,
add the EBCIDIC values of their consonants, then subtract 666 from the result,
you will get the names of all the gays, gypsies and jews who collaborated in
Roswell to kill JFK and 2 Pac, man.

~~~
tfh
reddit called ..

~~~
mahmud
tell her I ain't here

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKPW0dIaL2w>

