Posted on 09/13/2009 10:28:07 PM PDT by kingattax
NASA scientists announced Friday that they had picked a 60-mile-wide crater near the moon's south pole as the place where they will send a rocket to punch a hole in the lunar surface next month in search of water.
Instruments aboard other satellites and on Earth have detected a significant amount of hydrogen, a telltale marker for water, on the northwest rim of the crater known as Cabeus A.
"We're very confident we're going to hit a good place," Anthony Colaprete, lead scientist for the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, or LCROSS, mission, said at a briefing at Ames Research Center in Mountain View.
LCROSS consists of a small satellite and an accompanying rocket launched two months ago with a second spacecraft, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. Shortly after launch, the two spacecraft separated. While the lunar orbiter is using its instruments to map the moon remotely in search water traces, the smaller LCROSS satellite and its rocket are scheduled to plunge into the moon's surface on Oct. 9.
If all goes according to plan, scientists say, the giant cloud of dust sent wafting over the lunar surface will contain traces of water in the form of ice.
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
Go for it.
A giant dust cloud! On the moon! For Science!
But you know, it won't really be a "cloud" per se, and it certainly won't "waft". Most of the particles, even very small ones, will follow ballistic trajectories and settle on the surface very quickly. I suppose they're counting on vaporized water molecules to join the extremely diffuse, but existent, lunar atmosphere. I'm not sure how long this "cloud" would be expected to last.
They’re going to look for water in a place they can guarantee was heated to incandescence?
Yep. To analayze the material thrown up, if there is ice, future life for humans on the moon gets much easier.
You can make air, you can make fuel. Oxygen and Hydrogen.
Well worth the money. Exploration and the frontier culture built America. The nations that lead on the frontiers, get to dictate the course of human history.
Sure. Water to them means water molecules. Now the heat of formation of water is about 240 kJ/mol, and the ideal gas constant is about 8 J/mol/K, meaning that it takes a temperature on the order of 30,000 K to dissociate water, and this is well past the onset of incandesence. Besides, it'll cool down.
This is soooooo cool...
It will boil off long before it disassociates. Especially under vacuum.
Water chemically bound to minerals boils off at fairly low temperatures as well.
Even more so when the material is mechanically shocked.
The last place I’d look for water is at the bottom of an impact crater that has been under high vacuum since day one.
YMMV
Yes, they're counting on this, I'm sure. The "bloom of the rose", as it were.
"How often has the naughty thumb of science prodded thy beauty" - e e cummings
I understand that the moon is much too small to maintain a permanent atmosphere anything like earths, the solar wind would quickly sweep it away... However, "quickly" on the time scale of such things would still be 10,000 years or so. So what I've always wondered is if, sometime in the future, it would be possible to create an atmosphere on the moon and maintain it by "adding" to it every couple hundred years or so to replenish what is lost. Oh, well probably something for my great-great-great grandkids to worry about, at the rate we're going I'll be lucky to see men on the moon again in my lifetime.
Yes. It boiled off in the impact that made the 60 mile wide crater millions of years ago.
The crater has been under vacuum ever since.
Sure!
(BTW, why does Venus have such a thick atmosphere?)
Well, that’s what they’re going to check. If there’s water there like they think, they’ll see it.
(This really is rocket science!)
If you do some simple calculations, as I once did, you’ll see that the ideal model of an atmosphere is exponentional ... it extends to infinity. So, there’s no simple criterion for the density of a planets atmosphere. It’s a quantitative, not a qualitative, question. It ultimately depends on the time scale of various processes, which can extend from days and years to billions and trillions or more years. Of course, when processes become this slow, they are halted, from the planetary point of view.
In the case of Venus, it evolved a lot of CO2 in its early history, and stayed hot, which made it lose water, which left it stuck with its blanket of CO2. That’s as far as I see it.
It’s more subtle than that.
Venus’s magnetic field is both weaker and smaller (i.e. closer to the planet) than Earth’s
Venus is closer to the sun than the earth, therefore the solar winds are stronger.
Combined these factors should have stripped away even a thick primordial atmosphere long ago.
Think it through. Here’s a hint: Venus has very few impact craters...
Venus is the Acid Queen?
Yeah. They should have called it Lucy...
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