3 questions: Ben Weiss discusses what a wet moon might mean
Paul D. Fernhout
negative vibrations from surrealists).
http://blogs.abcnews.com/scienceandsociety/2009/10/moon-crash-wheres-the-water.html
But it looks like other evidence is in anyway about water all over the Moon.
"The planetary scientist explores the implications of the recent discovery
of water on the lunar surface."
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2009/3q-moon.html
"""
Q: How surprising was the detection of water on the surface of the moon,
especially in daylight regions?
A: It was enormously surprising and exciting. The accepted wisdom has
been that the moon is and has always been bone dry. Although water was
identified in the Apollo samples, it was generally discounted as terrestrial
contamination. The three studies last week, which involved spectroscopic
data from three different spacecraft taken over a period of 10 years, showed
that not only does the lunar soil apparently have up to 0.1 percent by
weight of water in its upper layer, but that this water is forming and
"exhaling" on timescales of just a lunar day. This means that much of this
water was recently emplaced and is present all over the surface of the moon.
Until now, it has generally been assumed that if there is any water on the
moon, it would almost exclusively be in the form of ice located mainly in
permanently shadowed craters at the lunar poles.
Q: Does this finding suggest that there may be amounts of water in the
lunar environment that would be sufficient to be a resource for future
astronauts working on the moon?
A: The spectroscopic evidence for lunar water only reflects the top few
millimeters of the lunar surface. Therefore, these data do not constrain the
abundance of lunar water throughout most of the lunar soil. Nevertheless, if
astronauts were to harvest soil containing water with an abundance like that
inferred from the spectroscopic data, then they would have to process about
a ton of regolith to obtain a liter of water. Given that water was observed
to leave the soil every lunar day due to solar heating up to 100 degrees
Celsius, this implies that simply heating the soil to these relatively mild
temperatures would be enough to liberate the water for use. I think this
makes it a promising resource for astronauts.
"""
Links to:
"NASA Instruments Reveal Water Molecules on Lunar Surface"
http://www.nasa.gov/topics/moonmars/features/moon20090924.html
--Paul Fernhout
http://www.pdfernhout.net/