fenrirguild.com -> View topic - Moon Press Conference

Livilla

Legionnaire

0. Moon Press Conference » Wed Sep 23, 2009 6:19 pm

http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2009/sep/HQ_M09_183_Moon_Science_Findings.html

If anyone is interested, there will be a press conference tomorrow about some of our new results from a lunar mission I am working on. My advisor and a few other colleagues from the team will be talking and answering some questions. It's at 2pm on NASA TV, which unless you live in a space-friendly place (Orlando, Houston) is not carried by most cable stations, but it is streamed on the web if you don't get it and care to watch.

Lunarian

Grunt

1. » Wed Sep 23, 2009 8:04 pm

Oh that's kind of cool, I'll have to see thiss

Livilla

Legionnaire

2. » Wed Sep 23, 2009 8:46 pm

Well, the results were under an embargo that was supposed to last until tomorrow, but it got leaked, so anyone who wants a preview can have a look:
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hLBM9BvkGLquVcjYI96_y2mQs6OgD9AT9B4O1

(actually its all over google news now, so take your pick...)

Vadai

High Warlord

3. » Wed Sep 23, 2009 10:45 pm

I remember watching a program that stated on average X(I forget the actual number) tons of water fall to earth every year from space objects(asteroids and comets).

Wouldn't it be fairly safe to assume if these same object smash into a moon with no atmosphere the water would still be there?

Ilarnek

Warlord

4. » Thu Sep 24, 2009 6:11 am

Think Livi can answer it better than I can, but the fact that there's no atmosphere would make it less likely I believe for the water to still be there.

Livilla

Legionnaire

5. » Thu Sep 24, 2009 10:02 am

The issue previously was that the Apollo samples all seemed very dry (though there was water there--we just assumed it was all adsorbed when they were exposed to humidity on Earth) and without the protection of an atmosphere it seemed that any water that was deposited on the surface would quickly be driven off as a vapor and lost to space.

Now that we see it all over, there are a few hypotheses. One is that it is cometary in origin, and it may be intermixed with the lunar soil and more tightly bound than we expected. Water is a very special molecule, and may stick to irregular and fractured surfaces even in an environment where it shouldn't be stable.

Delivis

High Warlord

6. » Thu Sep 24, 2009 10:59 am

The moon seems to have tiny, very tiny amounts of water on it all across it's surface. The most recent data is discussed in a decent article here.

http://www.universetoday.com/2009/09/23 ... -the-moon/

Livilla

Legionnaire

7. » Thu Sep 24, 2009 11:42 am

I'm a coauthor on the paper so now that we're allowed to talk about it I can explain the data in more detail...

Delivis

High Warlord

8. » Thu Sep 24, 2009 11:46 am

So this is tomorrow (friday) 2pm EST, aye? I'll be watching!

Obsidian

High Warlord

9. » Thu Sep 24, 2009 12:07 pm

Holy crap. You worked on this?

My jaw is on the floor.

I'm guessing the no atmosphere and extreme temperature flux factors rule out carbon based life? right?

Obsidian

High Warlord

10. » Thu Sep 24, 2009 12:07 pm

Delivis wrote:
So this is tomorrow (friday) 2pm EST, aye? I'll be watching!

It's going on right now, del.

I'm watching it on NasaTV. gogogogo

Livilla

Legionnaire

11. » Thu Sep 24, 2009 1:36 pm

Obsidian wrote:
Holy crap. You worked on this?

My jaw is on the floor.

I'm guessing the no atmosphere and extreme temperature flux factors rule out carbon based life? right?

Yes--the main options are some kind of solar wind interaction with normal rocks, accumulation of meteoritic/cometary material with water in it over billions of years, or some water surviving lunar formation at depth and being outgassed. I think those are all of the general processes we've thought of.

Its probably not a *lot* of water _but_ its a lot more than we expected. Which means, especially if it already liberates itself from the rocks throughout the cycle of a lunar day, we might be able to capture it and make use of it. While extracting it would be very expensive, it is still FAR more economical than hauling water to the moon to support an extended human presence there.

Obsidian

High Warlord

12. » Thu Sep 24, 2009 1:52 pm

Awesome.

Giant impact hypothesis is one of my favorite earth/moon origin theories. Is there any way that the water could have survived that? Everything I've heard about it has said that earth and what eventually formed the moon were instantly moltenized all the way through after the event.

Livilla

Legionnaire

13. » Thu Sep 24, 2009 2:05 pm

There is incredibly good evidence that most, if not all, of the moon was molten in its early history. But, the very top of it would have cooled to form a primitive crust pretty quickly, too, so its not necessary that all of the water was lost. However, there seems to be a depletion of sodium, which is less volatile than water, so its hard to imagine much remaining. Most Apollo samples suggest that they formed without much water, but there are some glasses now being studied that do show traces of original lunar water.

Its a pretty neat story developing, and like they said on the press conference, there are many MANY more questions now than we went in with. I can personally attest that we spent months and months trying to find an error in the data because we didn't believe that water could be there, but no matter what we did, the evidence remained.

One thing I've always been interested in is the delivery of water to the inner solar system in the first place. If you condense the solar nebula, you'd have to be way out in the asteroid belt before water would start condensing and accumulating with the solids. So, there is a lot of debate about whether these early water-rich protoplanets were flung into the inner solar system to deliver the water here and to Mars. Maybe as we learn more about this it will help us address that problem as well.

Science is so neat

I am incredibly lucky to have ended up with this career.

Obsidian

High Warlord

14. » Thu Sep 24, 2009 2:17 pm

40 years after Apollo and we still don't have an active presence there.

Quick. Somebody elect me supreme commander of the US so I can divert 1/4 of the country's budget to nasa.

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