>NASA’sArtemis program is looking for ice in shadowed craters near the moon’s south pole
I thought shadowed moon craters stay at roughly 63 degrees?
Vast new stores of water reported on the moon
151–160 of 189 posts
Re: Vast new stores of water reported on the moon
#152What nobody talks about is that the average temperature of lunar soil is below the freezing point of water and never gets above the freezing point over day-night cycles.
https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/19906/constant-lun...
If you buried a chunk of ice under a few meters of soil it might sublimate but if there were appropriate geological trapping structures for the vapor, underground ice could be stable on the moon and could be produced by drilling into it.
Such ice could not be detected by remote sensing the way people have detected signs of water on the moon so far.
Now it's just speculation, you'd need some mechanism for the ice to get there, I'm not so sure if any ice would remain if a comet hit the moon and some of it got buried by a landslide. I think how the
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteor_Crater
was made by an iron meteorite but very little of the material was left at the site.
Re: Vast new stores of water reported on the moon
#153Oh, goody, can't wait for Nestle to buy up the land and sell it for 100x profit.
That's a really interesting twist.
Could legally pour a lot of money to assure control over a parcel or a mine in Mars?
Re: Vast new stores of water reported on the moon
#154Re: Vast new stores of water reported on the moon
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
If water is plentiful and accessible, that could be used as shielding, no?
It is not my field, but if plentiful and accessible, we are talking about several thousand tonnes of water around a small habitat that could theoretically be used. Nevertheless, if I understood right, that immense amount of water would have a limited shelf life until acidification corrodes the containment structures, so it would need to be continuously treated and refrigerated, " Ionizing cosmic radiation is mostly g…
Any notion of the rate of that acidification? I can't imagine its happening quickly, still very fun to think about
Re: Vast new stores of water reported on the moon
#156I wonder if there are locations along the dark side / light side border, where some of this water boils off during the 'daytime' heat, and then freezes again during darkness, and is just sitting on the surface as a fine layer of frozen crystals? I know there in very little atmosphere, but maybe just enough to hold a little water vapor? Maybe over time this would allow more accumulation in permanently shaded parts of…
The current consensus is that any water deposited by a meteorite will be vaporized and lost unless it happens to end up in a "cold trap" permanently shadowed area. What you described is close to what happens when a meteorite with water hits the surface -water is dispersed and whatever water molecules randomly end up in a cold trap stay there.
Evidence of water in sunlit areas as in the article is new and it's thought that it is trapped in glass, so I think it's a separate mechanism and water escaping from inside of glass, being evaporated and then also ending up in a cold trap must be very unlikely.
Re: Vast new stores of water reported on the moon
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
That place has nice beer, but no atmosphere.
And their outdoor seating is terrible. One might call it suffocating.
The staff are a bit a let down, there's this one human spieces person who keeps mumbling on about how he ruled something called Twitter back in 2023 AD.
Re: Vast new stores of water reported on the moon
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
The surface has been slowly bombarded long after the moons creation. So surface mining could have a very different elemental mix than subsurface mining. ~48.5 tons of material hits the earth’s atmosphere per day. The moons smaller, but suck impacts where likely more common in the past * 4 billion years and you’re talking a few feet of such material across the entire surface. https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/asteroids-com…
Impact sites of larger asteroids are also great targets for mining operations. For example there's some speculation about the gigantic impact crater on the far side of the moon containing a gigantic metal lump below the surface https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Pole%E2%80%93Aitken_basi... https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/nasa-moon-mass-crater-met...
It's not entirely clear to me why you'd want to find asteroids on the moon rather than finding them in space, where the mass wouldn't hardly have to be lifted.
Re: Vast new stores of water reported on the moon
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t expect there to be much in the way of heavy elements on the moon. It’s mostly made of lighter stuff that got blasted off in the collision with earth when the moon was formed.
But shipping from the moon to the earth should be much cheaper? I don't have the math (so someone please do?) but based on the size of the Apollo 11, it seems to be trivial to send stuff to earth.
>> ... based on the size of the Apollo 11, it seems to be trivial to send stuff to earth.
You mean the worlds largest rocket? That machine that launched from the moon first had to be brought to the moon, a task requiring an enormous rocket and untold support structures on earth. Of course one might say "build the rocket on the moon from moon rocks" but that requires significant handwaving. Try smelting aerospace-quality metal in your garage before suggesting that anyone simply park an aluminum smelting facility in a lunar crater.
Re: Vast new stores of water reported on the moon
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t expect there to be much in the way of heavy elements on the moon. It’s mostly made of lighter stuff that got blasted off in the collision with earth when the moon was formed.
But shipping from the moon to the earth should be much cheaper? I don't have the math (so someone please do?) but based on the size of the Apollo 11, it seems to be trivial to send stuff to earth.
Looking at our handy solar system delta-v map[1] it takes 2.5 km/s of delta-v to get from the Moon's surface to an Earth intercept course (you can aerobrake to a landing) and 14.6 to get up from the Earth surface to the Moon's (no aerobraking, you have to use rockets to land). Also without an atmosphere you can use railguns and such to take off on the Moon, if you get more than a few km/s of boost on the Earth that way you'll burn up.
