
Water Found Deep Inside the Moon - chenster
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/07/water-moon-formed-volcanoes-glass-space-science/
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tambourine_man
I've always been more excited about a Moon colony than a Mars one. I mean,
compared to Mars, the Moon is ridiculously close.

Many of the same benefits Musk seeks (backup for Civilization, excitement) for
a fraction of the cost.

Low gravity and atmosphere on a dome would be more complicated, but again,
compared to Mars, _it 's right there_.

It would be a more humble and realistic first step, IMO.

~~~
bhnmmhmd
Although the Moon is much closer and "right there" for us, it's subject to
numerous meteoric incidents, some of which are disastrous enough to wipe out
any settlement we set up there.

Moreover, only half of the Moon sees the light of the Sun. This fact alone
reduces available surface for settlements to only half of the Moon.

While the Moon could be a temporary backup plan, in the long-term, you're
going to need to terraform a planet and make a suitable atmosphere, both of
which are not possible to do to the Moon.

Edit: Thanks to the commentators below who mentioned that while the Moon is
tidally locked to the Earth, most of its surface does indeed receive light
from the Sun.

Only one question though: If that is true, then why do they call it "the dark
side of the Moon"? (Honest question)

~~~
omellet
It's tidally locked, so you couldn't you put the settlement on the Earth-
facing side and not have to worry as much about meteors?

~~~
antaviana
Well, it's like holding a shield of a radius of only 6,371 km with an arm of
384,400 km long.

Or to put it in human terms, like holding a shield of 1.25 cm of radius with
your arm of 75 cm.

It will not protect you really very much.

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lovelearning
This was last month. Another analysis this month by a different organization
reached the opposite conclusion.

[1]: [https://scripps.ucsd.edu/news/analysis-rusty-lunar-rock-
sugg...](https://scripps.ucsd.edu/news/analysis-rusty-lunar-rock-suggest-
moons-interior-dry)

~~~
HugoDaniel
Lets hope they don't find oil there...

~~~
yohui
As you probably know, that's impossible since fossil fuels (as the name
suggests) are formed from the remains of prehistoric organisms. Since the Moon
is lifeless, it has no fossil fuels.

But I wouldn't mind if the moon did experience a resource rush (unless it
sparked a conflict). At least we would finally get to see a moon base.

~~~
shakna
Fossil fuels are known as biogenic oils or the like.

It has been theorised, but neither proven nor disproven, that abiogenic oils
might exist. (Earth is likely only the biogenic kind, but other planets may
differ).

That is to say, petroleum compounds can be formed without the need for
biological materials, but rather through pressure, heat, and bedrock.

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kin
Unrelated to the article, but WOW did anyone else see the giant full view
height ad video at the top? I have ad blocker off for NatGeo. It's followed by
a giant banner. I can't imagine how much crazier ads have been getting and
most of us don't even notice 'cause we have ad blocker.

~~~
nolok
> I can't imagine how much crazier ads have been getting

I would certainly argue the way this comment (and many others in a lot of
threads about ads here or elsewhere) seems to imply that ads are at their
worst ever.

I mean either people forgot or are too young to remember, but in the 2000's
alone ads had both their "pop up and sound and unclosable javascript spam" and
their "flash everywhere turning your modern supercomputer speed into that of a
80's calculator" eras, and probably a lot of other ad-cancers that my brain
chose to forget. The entire reason the ios/flash debate happened was because 1
- flash was on every page and ad, 2 - flash was eating every resources you
would throw at it and still need more.

I mean, I agree totally that the web without ad blockers is insane, but I
think many also see how it used to be as much better than it actually was.

~~~
mFixman
Remember pop-unders? I don't miss closing my browser and finding a dozen ads
hiding under the window.

~~~
nolok
Of course in that time you had no tab indicator to nicely tell you who was
playing sound.

Nothing quite like those search that took you on sketchy websites and their
porn pop under blasting orgasmic noises in your home / office while you
frantically try to find who does that (and then close everything because it's
taking too long).

"The good old time", as they say.

~~~
0xfeba
Sound indicators ... that time? Like a year ago?

~~~
nolok
I understand your jest, but for reference by "that time" I referred to back
when pop under were still a thing.

Searching for which tab makes sound is one thing, searching for it and not
finding it anywhere because it's a pop under positioned at the bottom right of
your screen is a whole other experience.

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Iv
Calm down.

From the article: "the glass beads contain only 0.05 percent water."

It is much drier than Sahara sand where soil moisture can reach 1%. Dune's
scenario would be a piece of cake compared to what you would need to do to
feed a colony off of this water. I suspect that energy-wise it would be
cheaper to import water from Earth and recycle like crazy.

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Abishek_Muthian
"In 2009, NASA crashed a rocket and a satellite into a crater on the moon’s
south pole, in the hopes of picking up additional watery evidence. "

NO, In 2008 ISRO crashed Moon Impact Probe (MIP) into lunar surface as part of
Chandrayaan-I mission. MIP didn't have any specific role, other than political
agenda. The NASA's Moon Minerology Mapper M3 onboard of the Chandrayaan
spacecraft was instrumental in providing the first mineralogical map of the
lunar surface.

Quoting S. Pete Worden, center director at NASA’s Ames Research Center :

“NASA missions like Lunar Prospector and the Lunar Crater Observation and
Sensing Satellite and instruments like M3 have gathered crucial data that
fundamentally changed our understanding of whether water exists on the surface
of the moon,”

National Geographic, having titled the article - 'Get the facts' and blatantly
ignoring ISRO's contribution is not healthy.

The reason I brought this up is not to score nationalist brownie points, but a
credit where it's due. In a country like India, where an organisation like
ISRO instills scientific termparment over large population; ignoring it's
contribution by global media focussed on science is an insult to entire
scientific community.

~~~
bb611
I think you're right to ask for credit where it's due, but this is not such a
place - the event being referenced is the 2009 LCROSS mission:
[http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/space/10/09/probe.moon.crash/in...](http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/space/10/09/probe.moon.crash/index.html)

I discovered this with a very quick google search of the terms "2009 NASA
crash moon"

~~~
Abishek_Muthian
You are right,the specific case about 2009 crash could be of NASA spacecraft.
But what about the entire context of the article ?

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pushpen99
Water molecules on moon was confirmed by Chandrayaan-I mission launched by
ISRO/India in 2009. Strange no mention of that in the article.

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mjevans
It wouldn't be as sexy as sending astronauts up, but I think we could get a
lot of bang for the buck sending up generic robots and some scientific
equipment that could also be used to boot-strap a local production environment
for some resources. (solar oven/etc)

I imagine it would be useful to gather core samples from a variety of
locations and catalog the location of resources. I wonder how much of that
could be done with higher intensity radar aimed at the surface while in
orbit...

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bad_user
" _The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress_ " novel doesn't seem so impossible now :-)

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goshx
Related:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15092099](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15092099)

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pasbesoin
Unless we settle our military confrontations (of varying degrees), any
successful political entity is going to have to take a (sufficiently potent)
position on the moon, first.

Unless it is willing to accept the circumstance of its sole continuation being
off-Earth (Mars, in the near term). And has the belief that its off-Earth
presence can continue and succeed in the absence of its erstwhile Earth-based
counterpart.

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grogenaut
Is the process of drilling for it less intensive than just making it from the
soil?

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gene-h
If this is really the case, it's a pretty big deal. While water is important
in keeping humans alive, one big near term application is propellant. Being
able to make H2-O2 propellant on the Moon could reduce the costs of lunar
return missions. There is also something of a business opportunity in using
propellant mined on the Moon to refuel satellites in Earth orbit. The delta V
cost from Moon-GEO(or pretty much any other orbit) is lower than the cost of
Earth to GEO. So if one can get the infrastructure set up it makes sense. But
water is useful for other things too. Just having access to hydrogen on the
Moon lets us do so many things. This makes it easier to do a number of
extractive processes, we can use hydrogen to reduce metals in lunar soil[5],
make acids like HCl and H2SO4, make silicone for seals, purify silicon for
solar cells and electronics.

Of course, we already know the Moon has water, the problem is this water is
located in permanently shadowed craters. It's hard to get power in a crater
that's permanently in the dark. In addition, aside from crashing a spacecraft
into one[0], we haven't explored these craters and don't know what the
environment is like.

But this new discovery implies that certain surface regions of the Moon could
have quite a bit of water. Sure, the water may not be as concentrated as in
permanently shadowed regions, but we can get power easier and we understand
the lunar surface environment better. Not only that, if the water is in the
form we expect, then we have ground truths from the apollo missions from which
we can start developing extraction processes[1]. The TRL for robots capable of
operating on the lunar surface is relatively high[2][3]. Using specs from top
performing team for NASA's lunar robotic mining challenge[] and the estimated
concentration of water in regolith, it is reasonable to assume that a rover
about the size of China's Chang'e rover could potentially mine enough regolith
in about ~75 days to obtain enough water to equal its landed mass(assuming
100% extraction from regolith).

Of course the problem is that the water is locked up in glass. We need to
grind or melt the glass up to get the water out. Grinding has the potential to
be more energy efficient, but I suspect we won't be able to extract very much
and melting glass uses quite a bit of energy. We might be able to reduce the
amount of energy by using a molten salt flux to reduce the melting
temperature.

Of course, another option is to be smarter about how we use the energy we put
into melting glass. We can recapture the heat and run a stirling engine for
electrical power. It would be even smarter to put the spent glass itself to
use since we have to melt glass anyway, we might as well form it into
something useful. We might use the spent glass to make bricks for landing
pads, roads, and other structures

[0][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LCROSS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LCROSS)
[1][http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2015/12/24/the-
last-...](http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2015/12/24/the-last-great-
discovery-of-apollo-lunar-volcanic-glass/)
[2][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunokhod_program](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunokhod_program)
[3][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yutu_(rover)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yutu_\(rover\))
[4][http://hdl.handle.net/2060/20120013082](http://hdl.handle.net/2060/20120013082)
[5][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chang%27e_3](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chang%27e_3)
[6][http://www.uapress.arizona.edu/onlinebks/ResourcesNearEarthS...](http://www.uapress.arizona.edu/onlinebks/ResourcesNearEarthSpace/resources04.pdf)

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Pica_soO
I wonder- if you warm it up and freeze it down- wouldnt the water fracture the
rock around it?

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Frogolocalypse
amazing. Stephen Baxters book 'Space' continues to connect with reality.

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overcast
That's no Moon!

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0xdeadbeefbabe
> From that point on, lunar water discoveries started gushing.

Edit: Just wait till the bottled water companies find out that moon water
exists. ([https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2017/08/18/maine-
poland...](https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2017/08/18/maine-poland-
spring-water-colossal-fraud-lawsuit/579140001/)).

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idlewords
I know a great place really close to the Moon where there's all the water you
want, and you don't even have to dig for it.

