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> And many scientists have long dreamed of building bases inside natural moon caves, where lunar explorers might sleep safely in inflatable homes, protected from the storms above. What "storms" are the authors talking about here?
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Sorry meant to expand more. The fact that the moon has such lower gravity than the earth means it's a lot cheaper in theory to get stuff from the surface of the moon to orbit than from earth
But there isn’t exactly a lot of readily available resources on the moon, so until that changes your just paying to lift stuff twice. Water may be an exception to this?
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The moon’s gravity isn’t strong enough to hold water vapor or any other atmospheric gas. It would either get siphoned off by the earth or just fly off into the solar system. The same is true of earth and helium.
Ok, and I like the comment about helium... But where did water originate?
answers your question.
If you are trying to go back to "why is there anything?", then the answer is "we don't know precisely, but we do know that if those things hadn't happened, we wouldn't be asking the question, so so we have no basis of knowing whether it's random, rare, or a near-certainty for a new universe."
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Where did the comets get the water they impacted on earth?
Water is just hydrogen plus oxygen. Both are fairly common elements in the universe.
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The same place that water came from on Earth... comet impacts and residual moisture from the impact that split the Earth-Moon system. Really the same place all planetary water and gas has come from. There's not much left because it mostly boils off due to low pressure, but in dark crevasses it's likely to stay cold enough to remain condensed. It's been measured spectroscopically.
Where did the comets get the water they impacted on earth?
Water is fairly abundant in the universe. As are alcohols.
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The same place that water came from on Earth... comet impacts and residual moisture from the impact that split the Earth-Moon system. Really the same place all planetary water and gas has come from. There's not much left because it mostly boils off due to low pressure, but in dark crevasses it's likely to stay cold enough to remain condensed. It's been measured spectroscopically.
Where did the comets get the water they impacted on earth?
Oxygen is pretty common and hydrogen is everywhere, so water (as ice) is not scarce in the universe. The only place where water is uncommon is near a star, like us, where the water boils off into space unless a planet has enough gravity to hold it in.
Anyone else remember that?
I wonder how stable such tubes would be? No water erosion, no earthquakes, even though they must have formed at a time that was more geologically active. They could be on the edge of collapse if say, a large vehicle drove in them. Am I wrong? Just a first thought. Other than that, they could probably serve as a goal for human spaceflight, an intermediate step between walking on the moon and colonizing mars.
> no earthquakes No but how about moon-quakes? Ok, not geologically active you say. But moon's been bombarded by asteroids it's surface is full of craters. Creating a crater wouldn't that be an equivalent of a moon-quake?
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Water is just hydrogen plus oxygen. Both are fairly common elements in the universe.
Under what circumstances does one need to have in order to make them combine into water, organically? (Meaning without any device or machine, assume you have two big clouds of each element floating in space - if they collide, do the naturally just form into water molecules?)
For a more technical description, the paper is here: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2017GL074998/full . "Detection of intact lava tubes at Marius Hills on the Moon by SELENE (Kaguya) Lunar Radar Sounder" Intact lunar lava tubes offer a pristine environment to conduct scientific examination of the Moon's composition and potentially serve as secure shelters for humans and instruments. We investigated the SE…
If the moon had ancient volcanic activity and thus, why is it, after observable impact from various bodies - shown in the craters all over the surface, and the sumizing of the fact that water was deposited to earth from extra-orbital impacts... does the moon have zero water or atmosphere? Where did water originate? (I didn't know how to format that question any better, so please forgive the fumbly format)
It's believed that Mars' atmosphere was considerably more dense than it is today, but along the way, its core cooled, and it lost its protective magnetic shield, allowing the solar wind to strip away much of its atmosphere.