Here’s an interesting entry from David Perlman, Chronicle Science editor. NASA just bombed the moon and found significant traces, about 25 gallons, of what seemed to be water in vapor form.
Since the moon is just some few hundreds of light years away and is habitable, in the future, we will be able to taste moon water. Yep, and I’ll bet that there will be a race as to who will be the first to drink moon water.
(11-13) 13:28 PST MOUNTAIN VIEW — The spacecraft that sent a used-up rocket crashing into a crater near the moon’s south pole last month uncovered “significant” quantities of water and possibly organic chemicals that may have come from comets that slammed into the lunar surface over billions of years, mission scientists announced Friday.
“We’re ecstatic,” said Anthony Colaprete, the LCROSS mission’s chief scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View as he described his team’s preliminary results after weeks of analyzing the debris plume that emerged from the crash and hung for more than two minutes in the airless dark of the crater’s permanently shadowed crater.
Colaprete estimated that the impact churned up water vapor and tiny fragments of crystalline ice equal to about 25 gallons of pure water and said the instruments aboard the spacecraft revealed the presence of many organic chemicals yet to be identified in the debris.
“We’re unlocking the mysteries of our nearest neighbor, and by extension the solar system, said Michael Wargo, NASA’s chief lunar scientist during Friday’s press conference at the Ames center.
When the carefully targeted crash of the spent Centaur rocket on Oct. 9 created its own crater 60 feet wide on the floor of Cabeus crater, many observers were disappointed because the expected plume of rocks, dirt and vapor failed to emerge into sunlight above the big crater’s walls.
Colaprete explained that scientists have since learned that the debris plume in fact had risen 12 to 24 miles high – most of the plume was invisible water vapor, while most of the fine-grained rocky material spread sideways more than 10 miles across the Cabeus crater’s floor.
As to the water itself, Colaprete said the Cabeus crater, where temperatures are as low as 365 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, is probably “a little wetter” than Chile’s Atacama desert, the driest of any deserts on Earth.
But if only 1 percent of the rocky material in Cabeus is water, he said, that could be a priceless resource for future lunar exploration.
“If you dug into the LCROSS crater and cleaned the dirt off the ice,” Colaprete said with a broad grin, “you could drink it.”
Ever since the LCROSS mission ended the scientists have been analyzing the spectra of the material that the spacecraft’s instruments gathered. They included sodium, potassium, hydrocarbons of all sorts and many organic molecules – including methanol – that make the mission’s harvest “a lot like a junk store,” said Wargo.
More analysis is yet to be done.
“We’ve been blow away by the data, and it’s going to take us weeks and weeks to find out what the moon is telling us,” Colaprete said.
November 13th, 2009 @ Ricky Rivera
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